Bartley must take a great deal of time. Wilson reflected that he had
never before known a woman who had been able, for any considerable
while, to support both a personal and an intellectual passion. Sitting
behind her, he watched her with perplexed admiration, shading his eyes
with his hand. In her dinner dress she looked even younger than in
street clothes, and, for all her composure and self-sufficiency, she
seemed to him strangely alert and vibrating, as if in her, too, there
were something never altogether at rest. He felt that he knew pretty
much what she demanded in people and what she demanded from life, and he
wondered how she squared Bartley. After ten years she must know him;
and however one took him, however much one admired him, one had to admit
that he simply wouldn't square. He was a natural force, certainly, but
beyond that, Wilson felt, he was not anything very really or for very
long at a time.

Wilson glanced toward the fire, where Bartley's profile was still
wreathed in cigar smoke that curled up more and more slowly. His
shoulders were sunk deep in the cushions and one hand hung large and
passive over the arm of his chair. He had slipped on a purple velvet
smoking-coat. His wife, Wilson surmised, had chosen it. She was clearly
very proud of his good looks and his fine color. But, with the glow of
an immediate interest gone out of it, the engineer's face looked tired,
even a little haggard. The three lines in his forehead, directly above
the nose, deepened as he sat thinking, and his powerful head drooped
forward heavily. Although Alexander was only forty-three, Wilson thought
that beneath his vigorous color he detected the dulling weariness of
on-coming middle age.


The next afternoon, at the hour when the river was beginning to