banker; and, though she never knew it, she came miraculously close to the truth.
The former boudoir had a marble floor on which were spread a tiger skin from India and a white bearskin from Siberia. There were mirrors on every side; the lady who had once occupied the room could not have turned her head without encountering a dozen reflections of her pink voluptuous body. (Wolff, being a German and a Jew, was certain to choose that sort of mistress.) The walls were covered with black satin on which had been painted a Parisian decorator's version of Tokyo in cherry blossom time. The chaise longue, fashioned like an Egyptian couch with carved lions' heads at both ends, stood almost hidden beneath great piles of cushions of fanciful design and color . . . mauve, yellow, green, crimson and black, all decorated with a profusion of tassels and gold lace. Lying upon it Sabine gazed at her innumerable reflections and thought that being a lady was much more satisfactory than being a demi-mondaine; only to laugh aloud the very next moment at the picture of her mother-in-law in respectable black satin and jet moving complacently about amid such vulgar and guilty splendor.
But all her thoughts were not amusing ones. For a bride, they were remarkably cynical and disillusioned. She was troubled by the change which had come over Callendar since their marriage . . . a change of which she had become aware almost at the moment she turned away from the altar of St. Bart's. Being the wife of Richard Callendar, she understood, was not the same as being his friend. This new relationship had altered everything. As a friend she might have found him satisfactory until the day of her death; as a husband . . . she did not know. She was puzzled. It seemed to her that in gaining a husband, she had lost a friend.
She understood, quite coldly and without conceit, that she was much more clever than most women of her age. She was
