When we were alone, Jessica said to me:
"That man has too much vanity, and he
thinks it is sensitiveness. He is going to
imagine that his wife makes him suffer.
There's no one so brutally selfish as your
sensitive man. He wants every one to live
according to his ideas, or he immediately
begins suffering. That friend of yours
hasn't the courage of his convictions. He
is going to be ashamed of the very qualities
that made him love his wife."

There was a hop that night at the hotel,
quite an unusual affair as to elegance, given
in honor of a woman from New York, who
wrote a novel a month.

Mrs. Brainard looked so happy that night
when she came in the parlor, after the
music had begun, that I felt a moisture
gather in my eyes just because of the beauty
of her joy, and the forced vivacity of the
women about me seemed suddenly coarse
and insincere. Some wonderful red stones,
brilliant as rubies, glittered in among the
diaphanous black driftings of her dress.
She asked me if the stones were not very
pretty, and said she gathered them in one
of her mountain river-beds.