January found the social life of the town in full swing. We had recovered from last year's financial jolt, and entertaining was constant. Raymond and his wife were invited out a good deal. He was bored by it all; but his wife remained interested and indefatigable. Finally came a dance at one of the great houses. Raymond rebelled, and refused point-blank to go: an evening in his library was his mood. His wife protested, cajoled, and he finally found a reason for giving in.

As I say, they were bidden to one of the great houses—one of the few that possessed an actual faÇade, a central court, and a big staircase: it had too its galleries of paintings and of Oriental curios before Oriental curios became too common. Its owner was also, with the rest, a musical amateur. He was a man of forty-five, and like Raymond had a wife too many years younger than himself for his own comfort. This lively lady lived on fiddles and horns—dancing was an inexhaustible pleasure. At her dancing-parties, of which she gave three or four a season, her husband would show himself below for a few moments for civility's sake, and then retire to a remote den on an upper floor, well shut out from the sounds of his wife's frivolous measures, but accessible to a few habituÉs of age and tastes approximating his own.

The question of music of another quality and to another purpose was in the air—it was a matter of endowing and housing an orchestra. Informal pour-parlers were under way in various quarters, and Raymond felt disposed, and even able, to contribute in a modest measure. It was his pride to have been asked, and it was his pride, despite untoward conditions, to put up a good front and do as much as he could. An hour's confab over cigarettes in that retired little den might clarify one atmosphere, if not another.

The court and its staircase were set with palms, as is the ineluctable wont on such occasions and for such places; and people, between the dances, or during them, were brushing the fronds aside as they thronged the galleries round the court to see the Barbizon masters then in vogue and the Chinese jades. As Raymond passed down the stairway, he met his wife coming up on the arm of Johnny McComas.

"She looked self-conscious," Raymond said to me, a few days after. I told him that he had seen only what he was expecting to see.

"And he looked too beastly self-satisfied." I told him that of late I had seldom seen Johnny look any other way.

"Where was his wife?" he asked. I told him she might easily be in the crowd on some other man's arm.

"Why were they there at all?" he demanded. And I did not tell him that probably they were there through his own wife's good offices.

That meeting on the stairs!—he made a grievance of it, an injury. The earlier meeting, with Johnny's own wife on his arm, had annoyed him as a general assertion of prosperity. This present meeting, with Raymond Prince's wife on Johnny's arm, exasperated him as a challenging assertion of power and predominance.

"I shall act," Raymond declared.

"Nothing rash," said I. "Nothing unconsidered, I hope."

"I shall act," he repeated. And he set his jaw more decisively than a strong man always finds necessary.