It must be confessed, also, that another matter, a simple affair of
gallantry, was giving him an equally unusual, unexpected, and absurd
annoyance, which he had never before permitted to such trivialities.
In a recent visit to a fashionable watering-place, he had attracted the
attention of what appeared to be a respectable, matter of fact woman,
the wife of a recently elected rural Senator. She was, however,
singularly beautiful, and as singularly cold. It was perhaps this
quality, and her evident annoyance at some unreasoning prepossession
which Jack's fascinations exercised upon her, that heightened that
reckless desire for risk and excitement which really made up the greater
part of his gallantry. Nevertheless, as was his habit, he had treated
her always with a charming unconsciousness of his own attentions, and a
frankness that seemed inconsistent with any insidious approach. In fact,
Mr. Hamlin seldom made love to anybody, but permitted it to be made to
him with good-humored deprecation and cheerful skepticism. He had once,
quite accidentally, while riding, come upon her when she had strayed
from her own riding party, and had behaved with such unexpected
circumspection and propriety, not to mention a certain thoughtful
abstraction,--it was the day he had received Sophy's letter,--that she
was constrained to make the first advances. This led to a later innocent
rendezvous, in which Mrs. Camperly was impelled to confide to Mr. Hamlin
the fact that her husband had really never understood her. Jack listened
with an understanding and sympathy quickened by long experience of such
confessions. If anything had ever kept him from marriage it was this
evident incompatibility of the conjugal relations with a just conception
of the feminine soul and its aspirations.

And so eventually this yearning for sympathy dragged Mrs. Camperly's
clean skirts and rustic purity after Jack's heels into various places
and various situations not so clean, rural, or innocent; made her