"Are you so much afraid, then, of being vulgar?"

She was evidently staggered by this. "Of course I
should hate it--so would you," she rejoined, a trifle
irritably.

He stood silent, beating his stick nervously against
his boot-top; and feeling that she had indeed found the
right way of closing the discussion, she went on light-
heartedly: "Oh, did I tell you that I showed Ellen my
ring? She thinks it the most beautiful setting she ever
saw. There's nothing like it in the rue de la Paix, she
said. I do love you, Newland, for being so artistic!"


The next afternoon, as Archer, before dinner, sat
smoking sullenly in his study, Janey wandered in on
him. He had failed to stop at his club on the way up
from the office where he exercised the profession of the
law in the leisurely manner common to well-to-do New
Yorkers of his class. He was out of spirits and slightly
out of temper, and a haunting horror of doing the same
thing every day at the same hour besieged his brain.

"Sameness--sameness!" he muttered, the word
running through his head like a persecuting tune as he saw
the familiar tall-hatted figures lounging behind the plate-
glass; and because he usually dropped in at the club at
that hour he had gone home instead. He knew not only
what they were likely to be talking about, but the part