Chapter II

I

Ruyler sighed as he heard his wife walk down the hall. There had been a time when she came running like a child at his summons, but in these days she walked with a leisurely dignity which to his possibly morbid ear betrayed a certain crab-like disposition in her little high heels to slip backward along the polished floor.

She came in smiling, however, and kissed him quickly and warmly. Her extraordinary hair hung down in two long braids, their blue blackness undulating among the soft folds of her thin pink negligee. For the first time Ruyler realized that pink was Helene's favorite color; she seldom wore anything else except white or black, and then always relieved with pink. And why not, with that deep pink blush in her white cheeks, and the velvet blackness of her eyes? People still raved over Helene Ruyler's "coloring," and Price told himself once more as she stood before him, her little head dragged back by the weight of her plaits, her slender throat crossed by a narrow line of black velvet, that he had married one of the most beautiful girls he had ever seen.

He was seized with a sudden sharp pang of jealousy and caught her in his arms roughly, his gray eyes almost as black as hers.

"Tell me," he exclaimed, and the new fear almost choked him, "does any other man interest you--the least little bit?"

She stared at him and then burst into the most natural laugh he had heard from her for months. "That is simply too funny to talk about."

"But I am able to give you so little of my time. Working or tired out at night--letting you go out so much alone--but I haven't the heart to insist that you yawn over a book, while I am shut up here, or too fagged to talk even to you. Life is becoming a tragedy for business men--if they've got it in them to care for anything else."

"Well, don't add to the tragedy by cultivating jealousy. I've told you that I am perfectly willing to give up Society and sit like Dora holding your pens--or filling your fountain pen--no, you dictate. What chance has a woman in a business man's life?"

"None, alas, except to look beautiful and be happy. Are you that?--the last I mean, of course!"

She nestled closer to him and laughed again. "More so than ever. To be frank you have completed my happiness by being jealous. I have wondered sometimes if it were a compliment--your being so sure of me."

"That's my idea of love."

"Well, it's mine, too. But if you want me to stay home--"

"Oh, no! You are fond of society? Really, I mean? Why shouldn't you be?--a young thing--"

"What else is there? Of course, I should enjoy it much more if you were always with me. Shall we never have that year in Europe together?"

"God knows. Something is wrong with the world. It needs