She who was to be the wife of a man of position, was determined that his friends and associates should find little to censure in her manners. For long Helena Tankerville figured to Joan as an impeccable model of tact, distinction, taste, and gentlewomanliness. To become as Helena was, summed up the dearest aspirations of the girl. She began to be very guarded in her use of English, eschewed as far as her means permitted the uniform style of costume to which New York women are largely prone, dressed her hair differently and upon no superstructure other than its own, and spent long hours manicuring and observing the minor niceties of the feminine toilet.
Paradoxically, with the obtuseness characteristic of a certain type of imaginative man, Matthias appreciated and was grateful for the improvement in his fiancée without realizing it objectively; what pleased his sensitive tastes, he accepted as normal expressions of innate good-breeding; what jarred, he glossed with charity. It was inconceivable that he should love any woman but one instinctively fine: he endowed Joan with many a grace and many a virtue that she did not possess; and this implicit assertion of his, that she was all that the mistress of his heart ought to be, incited her to more determined efforts to resemble all that by birth and training she was not.
It was some time before the novelty palled and she grew restive under the strain of it all....
"I had a talk with Rideout today," he observed during dinner, on an evening about a fortnight subsequent to the disbanding of "The Jade God" company. "He's dickering with Algerson—thinks the thing may possibly come to a deal before long."
"How do you mean?" Joan enquired with quick interest.
"Algerson wants to buy Rideout's interest in the play—at a bargain to himself, of course. Rideout is holding out for a better offer, but he's hard pressed, and I rather think he'll close with Algerson within a few days."
"Who's Algerson?" Joan asked, after an interval devoted to ransacking her memory for some echo of that name; resulting in the conviction that she had never heard it before.
"He runs a chain of stock companies out on the Pacific Coast, and now he's anxious to branch out into the producing business."
"And if he gets 'The Jade God'—when will he put it on?"
"Can't say—haven't seen him. I'm not supposed to know he's interested as yet; though of course they'll have to come to me before the deal can be ratified."