Mario Provana's wife was the fashion. The prestige for which some women strive and labour for years, spending themselves and their husband's fortunes in the strenuous endeavour, and having to confess themselves failures at last, had been won by Vera without an effort. Her husband's wealth had done much; her youth, and the something rare and exceptional in her beauty, had done more; but the Disbrowes had done the most of all. With such material—a triple millionaire's wife in the first bloom of her loveliness—the work had been easy; but no one could deny that the Disbrowes had worked, and might fairly congratulate themselves, as well as their fair young cousin, (first, second, or third, as the case might be) upon the result of their tactful efforts. All Disbrowes were supposed to have tact, just as they had arched insteps, and long, lean hands. It was as much a mark of their race.

From the day of Vera's return from her long Italian honeymoon she found herself walled round and protected by her mother's kindred. They came from all the points of the compass. Lord Okehampton from his park in North Devon, Lady Balgowrie from her castle in Aberdeenshire, Lady Helstone from the Land's End. They came unbidden, and overflowing with affection, but much too tactful to be vulgarly demonstrative.

"Poor Lady Felicia's foolish pride kept us all at a distance," they told Vera; "but now that you are emancipated, and your own mistress, I hope you will let us be useful."

From countesses down to hard-up spinsters, they all said the same thing, and no one could accuse them of "gush." They all announced themselves as worldlings, pure and simple, and they made no professions.

"You have made a great match, my dear," said Lady Helstone, "and you have a great career before you, if you are careful in the choice of your friends. That is the essential point. One black sheep among your flock might spoil all your chances. There are men about town that my husband calls 'oilers'—they were called tigers when my mother was young—and one of those in a new woman's visiting list can wreck her. The creatures are intolerably pushing, and don't rest till they can pose as cavaliere servente or at least as l'ami de la maison."

Vera welcomed this army of blood relations with amiability, but without enthusiasm. She was ready to love that one kind lady who had given her the only happy holiday of her childhood, under whose hospitable roof she had known Claude Rutherford; but the countesses who had been unaware of her existence while she was a dependant upon "poor Lady Felicia," could have no claim upon her affection. Yet they and their belongings were all pleasant people; and in that large and splendid house which was to be her home in London, she found that people were wanted.

The emptiness of those spacious rooms, during the long hours when her husband was at his offices in the City, soon became appalling; and she was glad of the lively aunts and cousins, and their following, who transformed her drawing-rooms into a parrot house, both for noise and brilliant colour, to say nothing of the aquiline beaks that prevailed among the dowagers and elderly bachelors. Once established as her relations—the distance of some of the cousinship being ignored—they came as often as Vera cared to ask them, and they brought all the people whom Vera ought to know, the poets, and novelists, and playwrights, who were all dying to know the daughter of Lancelot Davis, that delightful poet whom everybody loved and nobody envied. His fame had increased since he had gone into the ground; and his shade was now crowned with that belated fame which is the aureole of the dead. They brought the newest painting people, and the fashionable actors and actresses, English or American, as well as that useful following of "nice boys," who are as necessary in every drawing-room as occasional chairs, or tables to hold tea-cups.

Instigated by the Disbrowes, and with Mario Provana's approval, Vera soon began that grand business of entertaining, to which a triple millionaire's wife should indubitably devote the greater part of her time, talent, and energy. Countesses and countess-dowagers gave their mornings to her, advising whom she should invite, and how she should entertain. They instructed her in the table of precedence as solemnly as if it had been the Church Catechism, showed her how, in some rare concatenation, a rule might be broken, as a past master of harmony might, on occasion, allow himself the use of consecutive fifths.

They were never tired of extending Madame Provana's knowledge of life as it is lived in the London that is bounded on the south by Queen Anne's Gate and by Portland Place on the north. They called it opening her mind—and praised her for the intelligence with which she mastered the social problems.

Her husband was pleased to see her admired and cherished, above all to see her happy; yet he could not but feel some touch of disappointment when he looked back upon those quiet afternoons in the olive woods at San Marco, and the tea-parties of three in Lady Felicia's sitting-room, and remembered how he had thought he was marrying a friendless and unappreciated girl, who would be all the world to him, and for whom he must be all the world, in a long future of wedded love.

He thought he was marrying a friendless orphan, whose divine inheritance was poetry and beauty; and he found that he had married the Disbrowes.

They were all terribly friendly. They never hinted at his inferior social status, his vulgar level as a tradesman, only trading in money instead of goods. They behaved as if, by marrying their cousin, he had become a Disbrowe. Lady Helstone, Lady Balgowrie, Lord and Lady Okehampton treated him with affection without arriÈre pensÉe. The most that Okehampton, as a man of the world, wanted from the great financier was his advice about the investment of his paltry surplus, so trifling an amount that he blushed to allude to the desire in such exalted company.

But now a time had come when Vera needed no counsel from the Disbrowes, and when she was beginning to treat those social obligations about which she, as a tyro, had laboured diligently, with a royal carelessness. Her aunts complained that she had grown casual, and that she had even gone very near offending some of their particular friends, people whom to have on her visiting list ought to have been the crown of her life.

Vera apologised.

"I know far too many people," she said; "my house is becoming a caravanserai."

She said "my house" unconsciously—with the deep-seated knowledge that all those splendid rooms and the splendid crowds that filled them meant very little in her husband's life.

Six years of the "too much" had changed Lady Felicia's granddaughter. The things that money can buy had ceased to charm; the people whom in her first season she had thought it a privilege to know had sunk into the dismal category of bores. Almost everybody was a bore; except a few men of letters, who had known her father, or who loved his verses. For those she had always a welcome; and she was proud when they told her that she was her father's daughter. Her eyes, her voice were his, these enthusiasts told her. She was a creature of fire and light, as he was.

After three or four years of pleasure in trivial things, she had grown disdainful of all delights, except those of the mind and the imagination. The opera, or the theatre when Shakespeare was acted, always charmed her, but for the olla podrida of music and nonsense that most people cared for she had nothing but scorn. She never missed a fine concert or a picture show, but she broke half her engagements to evening parties, or appeared for a quarter of an hour and vanished before her hostess had time to introduce the new arrivals, American or continental, who were dying to know her.

The general impression was that she gave herself airs: but they were airs that harmonised with her fragile beauty, the something ethereal that distinguished her from other women.

"If any stout, florid creature were to behave like Madame Provana, she would be cut dead," people told Vera's familiar friend, Lady Susan Amphlett.

Lady Susan pleaded her friend's frail constitution as an excuse for casual behaviour.

"She is all nerves, and suffers agonies from ennui. Her father was consumptive, and her mother was a fragile creature who faded away after three years of a happy married life. It was a marriage of romance and beauty. Davis and his wife were both lovely; but they had no stamina. Vera has no stamina."

Lady Felicia had been lying more than a year in the family vault in Warwickshire. Her last years had been the most prosperous and comfortable years of her life, and the vision of the future that had smiled upon her in the golden light above the jutting cliff of Bordighera had been amply realised by the unmeasured liberality of her granddaughter's husband. Before Vera's honeymoon was over, the shabby lodgings in the dull, unlovely street had been exchanged for a spacious flat in a red brick sky-scraper overlooking Regent's Park. Large windows, lofty ceilings, a southern aspect, and the very newest note in decoration and upholstery had replaced the sunless drawing-room and the Philistine walnut furniture, and for those last years the Disbrowe clan ceased to talk of Captain Cunningham's widow as poor Lady Felicia. What more could any woman want of wealth, than to be able to draw upon the purse of a triple millionaire? As everything in Lady Felicia's former surroundings, her shifting camp of nearly twenty years, had been marked with the broad arrow of poverty, every detail of this richly feathered nest of her old age bore the stamp of riches; and the Disbrowes, who knew the price of things, could see that Mario Provana had treated his wife's relation with princely generosity.

Once more Lady Felicia's diamonds, those last relics of her youth, to which she had held through all her necessitous years, were to be met in the houses of the fashionable and the great; and Lady Felicia herself, in a sumptuous velvet gown, silvery hair dressed by a fashionable artist, emerged from retirement in a perfect state of preservation, having the advantage by a decade of giddy dowagers who had never missed a season.

The giddy dowagers looked at her through their face À main, and laughed about Lady Felicia's "resurrection."

"She looks as if she had been kept in cotton-wool and put to bed at ten o'clock every night," they said.

Grannie enjoyed that Indian summer of her life, and was grateful.

"You have married a prince," she told Vera, "and if you ever slight him or behave badly, you will deserve to come to a bad end."

Vera protested that she knew her husband's value, and was not ungrateful.

"I want to make him happy," she said.

"That is easy enough," retorted Grannie. "You have only to love him as he deserves to be loved."

"Was that so easy?" Vera wondered sadly.

It seemed to her that, by no fault of hers, there had come a difference in her relations with her husband. He was always kind to her, but he was farther from her than in the first year—the Italian year—which, to look back upon, was still the happiest of her married life. He was absorbed in a business that needed strenuous labour and unflagging care. He had told her that it was not his own interests alone that he had to guard; but the interests of other people. There were thousands of helpless people who would suffer by his loss of fortune, or his loss of prestige. The pinnacle upon which the house of Provana stood was the strong rock of a multitude. A certain anxiety was therefore inevitable throughout his business life. He could never be the holiday husband, sharing all a wife's trivial pleasures, interested in all the nothings that make the sum of an idle woman's existence.

Vera accepted the inevitable, and it was only when she began to think the best people rather boring, that she discovered how the distance had widened between herself and her husband. Without a dissentient word, without a single angry look, they had come to be one of those essentially modern couples whose loveless unions Father Cyprian deplored.

She thought the blame was with Mario Provana. He had ceased to care for her. Just as she had grown weary of her troops of friends, her husband had wearied of the wife he had chosen after a week's courtship.

"He thought he was in love, but he could not really have cared for me," she told herself. "His heart was empty and desolate after the loss of his daughter, and he took me because I was young and had been Giulia's friend."

This was how Vera reasoned, sitting in her lonely sanctuary, while on the other side of the wall there was a man of mature age, a man with a proud temper and a passionate heart, a man who had endured slights in his youth, whose first marriage had ended in disappointment, the crushing discovery that the beautiful girl who had been given to him by a noble and needy father had sacrificed her inclinations for the sake of her family, and had never loved him. She had been faithful, and she had endured his love. That was all. And in those last years, when disease had laid a withering hand upon her beauty, and when the world seemed far off, and when only her husband's love stood between her and death, she had learnt the value of a good man's devotion, and had loved him a little in return. He had suffered the disillusions of that first union. Yet again, after many years, he had staked his happiness upon a single chance, and had taken a girl of eighteen to his heart, in a state of exaltation that was more like a dream than sober reality. He had lavished upon this unsophisticated girl all the force of strong feelings long held in check. At last, at last, in the maturity of manhood, the love that had been denied to his youth was being given to him in full measure. He could not doubt that she loved him. That innocent, unconscious love, trusting as the love of children, revealed itself in tones and looks that he could not mistake. Before he asked her to be his wife he was sure that she loved him; but after six years of marriage he was no longer sure of anything, except that his wife was the fashion, and that her Disbrowe relations were innumerable. He was sure of nothing about this girl whom he had clasped to his breast in a rapture of triumphant love, on the hill above the Mediterranean. Year after year of their married life had carried her farther away from him. Who could say precisely what made the separation? He only knew that the years which should have tightened the bond had loosened it; and that he could no longer recognise his child-wife of their Roman honeymoon in the fragile ennuyÉe whom Society had chosen to adore.