"I'll admit it's a coward."
"And I hope I can always frighten enough of it into my service to satisfy my needs. But I'm not spending my life in its service—no, thank you!"
XII.
AFTER EIGHT YEARS.
While Scarborough was serving his clerkship at Indianapolis, Dumont was engaging in ever larger and more daring speculations with New York as his base. Thus it came about that when Scarborough established himself at Saint X, Dumont and Pauline were living in New York, in a big house in East Sixty-first Street.
And Pauline had welcomed the change. In Saint X she was constantly on guard, always afraid her father and mother would see below that smiling surface of her domestic life which made them happy. In New York she was free from the crushing sense of peril and restraint, as their delusions about her were secure. There, after she and he found their living basis of "let alone," they got on smoothly, rarely meeting except in the presence of servants or guests, never inquiring either into the other's life, carrying on all negotiations about money and other household matters through their secretaries. He thought her cold by nature—therefore absolutely to be trusted. And what other man with the pomp and circumstance of a great and growing fortune to maintain had so admirable an instrument? "An ideal wife," he often said to himself. And he was not the man to speculate as to what was going on in her head. He had no interest in what others thought; how they were filling the places he had assigned them—that was his only concern.
In one of those days of pause which come now and then in the busiest lives she chanced upon his letters from Europe in her winter at Battle Field. She took one of them from its envelope and began to read—carelessly, with a languid curiosity to measure thus exactly the change in herself. But soon she was absorbed, her mind groping through letter after letter for the clue to a mystery. The Dumont she now knew stood out so plainly in those letters that she could not understand how she, inexperienced and infatuated though she then was, had failed to see the perfect full-length portrait. How had she read romance and high-mindedness and intellect into the personality so frankly flaunting itself in all its narrow sordidness, in all its poverty of real thought and real feeling?
And there was Hampden Scarborough to contrast him with. With this thought the truth suddenly stared at her, made her drop the letter and visibly shrink. It was just because Scarborough was there that she had been tricked. The slight surface resemblance between the two men, hardly more than the "favor" found in all men of the family of strong and tenacious will, had led her on to deck the absent Dumont with the manhood of the present Scarborough. She had read Scarborough into Dumont's letters. Yes, and—the answers she addressed and mailed to Dumont had really been written to Scarborough.
She tossed the letters back into the box from which they had reappeared after four long years. She seated herself on the white bear-skin before the open fire; and with hands clasped round her knees she rocked herself slowly to and fro like one trying to ease an intolerable pain.