was alert; and while presenting to the world all the outward effect of a
butterfly, she possessed some of the best qualities of the bee.

With his senatorial presence, his distinction of person and manner, Mr.
Pasmer was inveterately selfish in that province of small personal things
where his wife left him unmolested. In what related to his own comfort
and convenience he was undisputed lord of himself. It was she who ordered
their comings and goings, and decided in which hemisphere they should
sojourn from time to time, and in what city, street, and house, but
always with the understanding that the kitchen and all the domestic
appointments were to her husband's mind. He was sensitive to degrees of
heat and cold, and luxurious in the matter of lighting, and he had a fine
nose for plumbing. If he had not occupied himself so much with these
details, he was the sort of man to have thought Mrs. Pasmer, with her
buzz of activities and pretences, rather a tedious little woman. He had
some delicate tastes, if not refined interests, and was expensively fond
of certain sorts of bric-a-brac: he spent a great deal of time in packing
and unpacking it, and he had cases stored in Rome and London and Paris;
it had been one of his motives in consenting to come home that he might
get them out, and set up the various objects of bronze and porcelain in
cabinets. He had no vices, unless absolute idleness ensuing
uninterruptedly upon a remotely demonstrated unfitness for business can
be called a vice. Like other people who have always been idle, he did not
consider his idleness a vice. He rather plumed himself upon it, for the
man who has done nothing all his life naturally looks down upon people
who have done or are doing something. In Europe he had not all the
advantage of this superiority which such a man has here; he was often
thrown with other idle people, who had been useless for so many
generations that they had almost ceased to have any consciousness of it.
In their presence Pasmer felt that his uselessness had not that passive