imagine people haven't seen it and talked of it by scores—I'm not such a poor head-hiding ostrich as that. . . And now, at last, she has begun to complain. It's no feeble remonstrance, either. She doesn't merely deplore affairs as they exist; she demands a sweeping change in them. It seems queer that she should, after her long and remarkable patience with me."
He lapsed into silence, and I straightway took the opportunity of saying, "She has certainly shown great patience with you."
"That's your real belief, is it?" he questioned, with emphatic anxiety, where contrition also appeared operative.
"It's not merely my belief," I returned; "it's my firm conviction."
He started up from his chair, went to the window in whose sunny flood he had been sitting, and soon turned from it with his face full of both sombreness and resolve.
"I'll conquer my folly!" he cried. " I'll yield to Millicent in everything. She shall go everywhere; she shall know everybody. By Jove, Douglas, if the men make love to her I shan't mind—or I shall force myself not to mind!"
"Draw the line there," I said, smiling—though I felt almost as little like smiling as I had ever felt in my life. . . .
The next few weeks corroborated unmistakably this new resolution. The Second Avenue house was thrown open to guests with a successful abruptness which bespoke wonders for the dormant potency of Demotte's name and position. There is a strong flavor of nonsense in such a fact, when recorded of a republican city like New York. If some European nobleman had thrown open his doors to the merry patrician monde after a prolonged retirement or absence, their acquiescence in his desire to meet them once more would have suggested no element of strangeness. But here was Floyd Demotte, in the chief city of a country whose very roots of being were supposed to strike far down within the fresh, untainted soil of democracy, and yet who found himself easily able, after neglecting it for years, to assert a handsome patent of grandeeship, the reverse of all conceivable principles on which our American commonwealth was founded.
But let the shafts of satire, that almost any hand may sharpen, rest, so far as concerns my own sense of this national self-contradiction, quietly unshaped. The truth remains that Floyd Demotte bared his threshold, and that many amiable, modish and well-bred people thronged across it into the rather limited drawing-rooms which lay beyond. The season suited such a dispensation of hospitality. Three or four afternoon teas blended themselves very appositely with the festivities reigning elsewhere in town. Then, too, there was a marked curiosity to see the woman whom Floyd Demotte had married. Of course the accredited umpires of society sent cards in return for those of Mr. and Mrs. Demotte. There could certainly not be the least danger in their doing so—as they unanimously argued. She may have been a Miss Heaven-knows-whom, but she was now Floyd Demotte's wife, and was not he bound by complicated ties of blood to the noblest families of Knickerbockerdom? Assuredly he had been a bear of seclusion
