Isabelle had learned to "look after herself," as she phrased it, by which she meant exercise, baths, massage, days off when she ran down to Lakewood, electricity,—all the physical devices for keeping a nervous people in condition. It is a science, and it takes time,—but it is a duty, as Isabelle reflected. Then there was the little girl. She was four now, and though the child was almost never on her hands, thanks to the excellent Miss Butts, Molly, as they called her, had her place in her mother's busy thoughts: what was the best regimen, whether she ought to have a French or a German governess next year, how she should dress, and in the distance the right school to be selected. Isabelle meant to do her best for the little girl, and looked back on her own bringing up—even the St. Mary's part of it—as distressingly haphazard, and limiting. Her daughter should be fitted "to make the most of life," which was what Isabelle felt that she herself was now beginning to do.

So Isabelle was occupied, as she believed profitably, spending her new energy wisely, and though she was getting worn, it was only a month to the date she had set for sailing. Vickers had promised to meet her at Genoa and take her into the Dolomites and then to San Moritz, where she could rest. As her life filled up, she saw less of her husband than ever, for he, too, was busy, "with that railroad thing," as she called the great Atlantic and Pacific. She made him buy a horse and ride in the Park afternoons when he could get the time, because he was growing too heavy. He had developed laziness socially, liked to go to some restaurant for dinner with chance friends that were drifting continually through New York, and afterwards to the theatre,—"to see something lively," as he put it, preferably Weber and Fields', or Broadway opera. Isabelle felt that this was not the right thing, and boring, too; but it would all be changed when they were "settled." Meantime she went out more or less by herself, as the wives of busy men have to do.

"It is so much better not to bring a yawning husband home at midnight," she laughed to Cairy on one of these occasions when she had given him a seat down town in her cab. "By the way, you haven't spoken of Conny lately,—don't you see her any more?"

Isabelle still had her girlish habit of asking indiscreet, impertinent questions. She carried them off with a lively good nature, but they irritated Cairy occasionally.

"I have been busy with my play," he replied shortly.

As a matter of fact he had been attacked by one of those fits of intense occupation which came upon him in the intervals of his devotions. At such times he worked to better effect, with a kind of abandoned fury, than when his thoughts and feelings were engaged, as if to make up to his muse for his periods of neglect. The experience, he philosophized, which had stored itself, was now finding vent,—the spiritual travail as well as the knowledge of life. A man, an artist, had but one real passion, he told Isabelle,—and that was his work. Everything else was mere fertilizer or waste. Since the night that Conny had turned him from the door, he had completed his new play, which had been hanging fire all winter, and he was convinced it was his best. "Yes, a man's work, no matter what it may be, is God's solace for living." In response to which Isabelle mischievously remarked:—

"So you and Conny really have had a tiff? I must get her to tell me about it."

"Do you think she would tell you the truth?"

"No."

Isabelle, in spite of Cairy's protestations about his work, was gratified with her discovery, as she called it. She had decided that Conny was "a bad influence" on the Southerner; that Cairy was simple and ingenuous,—"really a nice boy," so she told her husband. Just what evil Conny had done to Cairy Isabelle could not say, ending always with the phrase, "but I don't trust her," or "she is so selfish." She had made these comments to Margaret Pole, and Margaret had answered with one of her enigmatic smiles and the remark:—