to herself, and, while the gravity of the situation entered into him, he
smoothed out the torn and crumpled sheets and went with them to his
study. Until to-night he had looked upon Connie's extravagance merely as
an innocent childish failing, resulting from an inherent incapacity, as
she laughingly said, "to do sums," but now as he sat under the green
lamp shade, anxiously multiplying item after item, it seemed to him that
this recent recklessness involved not only her private happiness but
his own personal honour. He was a hot-tempered man by nature, and at
first the very absurdity of her expenditures, the useless, costly
trifles which made up the amount, produced in him an unreasoning passion
of anger. Had she been in the house he would have gone to her in the
first shock of his temper, but her ceaseless pursuit of pleasure had put
her beyond his reach, so he sat silently staring at the neatly arranged
heap of papers while his exasperation cooled within him.

Presently, still sitting motionless in his chair, he felt the absolute
quiet of the room take effect upon his mood, and with the peculiar
tolerance confirmed as much by balked ambition as by years of enforced
and bitter patience he began with a philosophic and impersonal leniency
to soften in his judgment of Connie's case. At the moment there was no
tenderness, he told himself, in the view he took, and he gave to her
merely the distant, habitual charity that he would have extended to the
stranger in the street. To give to her in the very least seemed to him
suddenly almost impossible when he remembered that from a forlornly
foolish caprice she had plunged him into a debt of several years. He had
worked hard, with broken health, in a profession of small financial
returns, but to his own simple tastes his income might have brought not
only perfect material ease, but the enjoyment of comparative luxury.
Still there was Connie--he had always in every situation remembered that
there was Connie--and in order to insure her present comfort as well as