more feminine--if he could have counted on her imaginative
sympathy or her moral obtuseness--but he was sure of neither. He
was sure of nothing but that, for a time, he must avoid her.
Glennard could not rid himself of the delusion that by and by his
action would cease to make its consequences felt. He would not
have cared to own to himself that he counted on the dulling of his
sensibilities: he preferred to indulge the vague hypothesis that
extraneous circumstances would somehow efface the blot upon his
conscience. In his worst moments of self-abasement he tried to
find solace in the thought that Flamel had sanctioned his course.
Flamel, at the outset, must have guessed to whom the letters were
addressed; yet neither then nor afterward had he hesitated to
advise their publication. This thought drew Glennard to him in
fitful impulses of friendliness, from each of which there was a
sharper reaction of distrust and aversion. When Flamel was not at
the house, he missed the support of his tacit connivance; when he
was there, his presence seemed the assertion of an intolerable
claim.

Early in the winter the Glennards took possession of the little
house that was to cost them almost nothing. The change brought
Glennard the immediate relief of seeing less of his wife, and of
being protected, in her presence, by the multiplied preoccupations
of town life. Alexa, who could never appear hurried, showed the
smiling abstraction of a pretty woman to whom the social side of
married life has not lost its novelty. Glennard, with the
recklessness of a man fresh from his first financial imprudence,
encouraged her in such little extravagances as her good sense at
first resisted. Since they had come to town, he argued, they
might as well enjoy themselves. He took a sympathetic view of the