out for. The greater part of her life having been passed among
them, she knew nearly all that there was to know about them, and
judged them with the contemptuous lucidity of nearly twenty
years of dependence. But at the present moment her animosity
was diminished not only by the softening effect of love but by
the fact that she had got out of those very people more--yes,
ever so much more--than she and Nick, in their hours of most
reckless planning, had ever dared to hope for.

"After all, we owe them this!" she mused.

Her husband, lost in the drowsy beatitude of the hour, had not
repeated his question; but she was still on the trail of the
thought he had started. A year--yes, she was sure now that
with a little management they could have a whole year of it!
"It" was their marriage, their being together, and away from
bores and bothers, in a comradeship of which both of them had
long ago guessed the immediate pleasure, but she at least had
never imagined the deeper harmony.

It was at one of their earliest meetings--at one of the
heterogeneous dinners that the Fred Gillows tried to think
"literary"--that the young man who chanced to sit next to her,
and of whom it was vaguely rumoured that he had "written," had
presented himself to her imagination as the sort of luxury to
which Susy Branch, heiress, might conceivably have treated
herself as a crowning folly. Susy Branch, pauper, was fond of
picturing how this fancied double would employ her millions: it
was one of her chief grievances against her rich friends that
they disposed of theirs so unimaginatively.