And now, as she sat back in her carriage, remembrance came rapping like an unwelcome, unadmitted visitant. She tried to put it away by chattering smartly; the theatre-wagon rolled along to the clicking of hoofs on the asphalt; but through it all the troublous knocking persistently recurred. For this was one of the few times when she had lingered upon a thought of that first romance of hers; and now, coupled with her hardening criticism of Willoughby, it brought forth insistent questions.
Whether she had really loved her husband when she married him, or whether she had not instead been dazzled by his peculiar abilities remained in doubt.
Severance had come first; he had a little money to begin, and he was doing well with it and seemed on the road to do better. Therefore, her friends were secure in the belief that she would marry him, when Willoughby had made his appearance.
He went at this love-making of his as he went at all his affairs—implacably bold and ruthlessly sweeping aside whoever or whatever came into his way. The fact that he and Severance were considered friends seemed to have counted little; and when, a few months later, it was learned that she had dropped one to take the other, it was also learned that Severance had played at ducks and drakes with his money. Briefly, he had become bankrupt in a mining deal. He and others, Willoughby among them, had gone into a Wyoming copper prospect—the Teton Sisters Company—and while Willoughby apparently got off without damage, Severance had dropped everything. How, was never clearly understood. Severance and his sister had parted with their home to satisfy his creditors, and then moved away.
In the twelve years of the Willoughbys' married life, the tide of money had kept steadfastly on the flood. Nothing his hands touched seemed to fail him. He had his fingers in every kind of venture—mines and mills, foundries and furnaces, steam roads, trolley lines and public utilities; and to each and every one of these promotions, the name of Willoughby affixed the hall-mark of success. Now his dollars jingled in every state of the Union—and they jingled in his own home, too, almost as the only evidences that the home was his. For Willoughby, pursuing money everywhere, seemed to have lost interest in all else but his money-grubbing, just as Willoughby's wife, excepting for the same money-grubbing, seemed to have lost all interest in him.
And now she had looked at Severance; her eyes had rested on him long enough to make comparisons—Severance much improved, cool, suave, presentable, and deferential; her husband big and masterful, a brooding, preoccupied man, and a kind of Orson to be kept denned in his money caves. She sighed to herself regretfully.
Some minutes after Mrs. Willoughby had found her seat in the theatre box she was aware of another party coming down the aisle. "Hello!" exclaimed the man beside her, "here come Hudson Mills and his wife with Case Severance. I didn't know he was in town."
Mrs. Willoughby laid a gloved finger to her lips and affected to yawn, though she stole a glance out of the corner of her eye. Her guest was now nodding over her shoulder at the arrivals in the seats below.
"Severance has made a ten-strike, I hear," he volunteered, in an expressive, if inelegant, idiom of the money game; "there's a story going the rounds that Mills and Severance have been gunning together and that some one else got burned. Anyway, I hear they've lined their pockets. Severance is rich again."
This mixed metaphor affected Mrs. Willoughby with a curious interest. "Oh, is he!" she exclaimed, and, glancing down, she looked unexpectedly into Severance's watching eyes.