Whatever Lorraine thought concerning Dan’s frequent absences and his attitude regarding his home and what happened therein, she still followed the path of the Victorian era and kept her own counsel. Nor did any one try to disturb her gentle self by the agony of doubts. For one reason the “genteel grafters,” such as Cora, Hazel, Josie and Owen of the art shoppe fame, came to Lorraine’s home only for what advantages could be obtained. Why then disturb her who gave them the advantages? There might be an end of them if they did. To be sure they gossiped among themselves and the societies and lodges with vivid imagination and a generous manner of embellishing a truly innocent but unique situation—a high-minded, spirited man too high for his town yet too undisciplined for the city who haunted the footsteps of a high-minded, spirited woman who had become big enough in abilities for the entire world and who was dying inwardly of ennui and heart-lonesomeness, who took this mild sort of affair as the one genuine and refreshing thing in her hurried, de luxe existence. Neither of these young people realized the harm it incurred. They cheated themselves into believing it “merely palship” or “an expression of individuality”—a very nice sort of garden and not wild oats affair!

Sometimes Thurley met Dan with a zest for his boyish mannerisms, his telling of the rise in wool goods, what a splendid housewife Lorraine was—only she didn’t understand things—how jealous he was of the basso who made love to Thurley on the opera stage. Sometimes she looked at him in disdain, the strange sneer on her lips as she thought of what a dull existence was Dan’s, what a lark it was to see him strive to make as good a showing as the young millionaire who was hopelessly infatuated with this Thurley Precore, boasting at his club that she would wear his necklace or his flowers before the season ended. The vampire which is in all women and which is not a sinister quality only to be raved about as “a rag and a bone and a hank of hair,” had for the time being become supreme in Thurley. Dan did not understand this—any more than he understood why he was unhappy when he was near Thurley and always thinking about Lorraine and why, when he returned home, fortified a thousand times by the blessed memories of Thurley’s beauty and the stolen moments he had claimed, he was unhappier still.

Dan would return to his immaculate, prosaic living-room where Lorraine would greet him and inform him all in the same breath that Lydia Hoyt was engaged and Lorraine would give a kitchen shower—and did Dan notice how the veranda posts sagged, hadn’t he better have a man come up and see about them?—oh, yes, there was something wrong with her car, well—she had let Owen drive it because he had deliveries to make ’way out in the country—beefsteak was three cents higher a pound than last week and two of the church deacons had resigned because they couldn’t have their way about the music.

After which Dan would slip away to unpack his bag and Lorraine to prepare his supper. There would be an abundant, well cooked meal on the prosaic table with its nightmares of hand painted peppers and salts and cut glass monstrosities, the water pitcher heavily banded with gilt. After eating his fill, Dan would depart to smoke in peace and wonder what Lorraine would think of Thurley’s new frocks and the baskets of flowers which forever adorned her rooms, of the bizarre friends and their weird ways—he would end, however, with the somewhat hopeless consolation that Lorraine had about as much imagination or capacity for artistic enjoyment as the old lady who, upon seeing mountains for the first time, merely said querulously,

“Dear me, if any one ever started to roll—”

For Lorraine would have probably remarked, after viewing Thurley’s apartment, “How in the world does she ever get the work done!” letting the panorama of joys and possibilities sweep on uncomprehended.

Therefore, Dan had decided, after very arduous sophistry, it was not wrong to see Thurley, to keep her in his bewildered heart as a sort of lovely idol, something set apart from the Corners and his house-and-garden life—something as different as the scarlet tanager or the jewelled dragon-fly is different from the barn-swallow or the field-daisy! Each has its own place.

But when spring began to hint of its appearance and Dan had been in New York over Easter, while the Corners gossiped about his absence, although Lorraine bravely occupied the front church pew and wore her new silk gown, Dan came home prepared to tell Lorraine that he would probably be away very often during the summer.

He waited until the work was “done up” and Lorraine brought her everlasting handiwork to join him in the den. The den itself was sufficient to make Dan’s nerves rebel—it had been furnished a few months after their marriage, an upstairs bedroom transformed into an inquisition chamber, as he told Thurley.

Dens in such hamlets as the Corners offer no raison d’Être save when a cartoonist gets a peek at them or the family scapegoat turns up unawares and is made to occupy the combination divan and folding lounge.

Lorraine fondly pictured the den as an ideal place for Dan to come and rest—“A real man’s room,” she explained, “where they smoke and play cards—and talk about things!” It was adorned by Indian heads, an oak table with a prim scarf done in poppies and maidenhair fern, a lounge with pillows made from cigar ribbons and college pennants, all placed in undying positions of rectitude, glass candlesticks with pink shades, a shining little ash tray and match box, a shelf of detective stories and old magazines, an easy chair in old rose velours, two fragile rocking chairs, some grinning lithographs of cowboys, African savages, Christy girls and bulldogs placed at exact intervals about the pink flowered walls and dimity curtains criss-crossed and crisp from recent washing to shut out the light!

Seated here, this April evening, a hundred thoughts clamoring for consideration before the task of telling Lorraine he was to be in New York a great deal, Dan pretended to play solitaire and keep up a desultory conversation about the way a neighbor trained a pumpkin vine over his woodshed and captured the village improvement prize!

The absence of sympathy between them seemed a relentless, chilly wind whipping on his treasonous speech, all the more so because Dan had no truly logical excuse. On the face of it, what more could a man demand? That is, if one were magnanimous about the Indian heads and sofa pillows, what right had he, a small town shopkeeper, to wail his heart out for a genius?

“Oh, ’Raine,” he said abruptly, shuffling the cards with a fillip, “I may have to run off for a few days in a couple of weeks—all right?”

Lorraine did not answer; she bent her head over her work.

Dan looked at her sharply. “Isn’t it all right?” His voice had that dangerous gentleness at which she always winced.

“Is she coming back this summer?” She dropped the sewing.

Dan put aside the cards and came beside her. Under the flare of the reading light her face seemed thinner and more childish. There was a miraculous subtlety of features, a hidden delicate something which he could not analyze; he felt boorish, brutal, as absurd as when he was one of Thurley’s guests at a party and every one really made polite game of him.

He kept looking at Lorraine, wondering why this change had come about; tired purple shadows were under her eyes, the eyes themselves were soft, shining things seeming to look far beyond him.

She raised her hand, crumpling the sheer, white slip on which she was sewing.

“You mean Thurley,” he stammered, “well—I—I don’t know, dear, you see the Fincherie is Miss Clergy’s house and of course ... oh, ’Raine ... now, I understand,” his eyes staring at the tiny, gossamer dress!