standing there, silent, looking him through and through, as cold as
a statue. Was she the personification of justice? Was this but a
foretaste of the ostracism of the world?

"When we were first married, Constance," he began sadly, "I was only
a clerk for Green & Co., at two thousand a year. We talked it over.
I stayed and in time became cashier at five thousand. But you know
as well as I that five thousand does not meet the social obligations
laid on us by our position in the circle in which we are forced to
move."

His voice had become cold and hard, but he did not allow himself to
be betrayed into adding, as he might well have done in justice to
himself, that to her even a thousand dollars a month would have been
only a beginning. It was not that she had be accustomed to so much
in the station of life from which he had taken her. The plain fact
was that New York had had an over-tonic effect on her.

"You were not a nagging woman, Constance," he went on in a somewhat
softened tone. "In fact you have been a good wife; you have never
thrown it up to me that I was unable to make good to the degree of
many of our friends in purely commercial lines. All you have ever
said is the truth. A banking house pays low for its brains. My God!"
he cried stiffening out in the chair and clenching his fists, "it
pays low for its temptations, too."

There had been nothing in the world Carlton would not have given to
make happy the woman who stood now, leaning on the table in cold
silence, with averted head, regarding neither him nor the pile of
greenbacks.