Waythorn dropped into another chair, staring vaguely ahead of him.
On his dressing-table stood a photograph of Alice, taken when he had
first known her. She was Alice Varick then--how fine and exquisite
he had thought her! Those were Varick's pearls about her neck. At
Waythorn's instance they had been returned before her marriage. Had
Haskett ever given her any trinkets--and what had become of them,
Waythorn wondered? He realized suddenly that he knew very little of
Haskett's past or present situation; but from the man's appearance
and manner of speech he could reconstruct with curious precision the
surroundings of Alice's first marriage. And it startled him to think
that she had, in the background of her life, a phase of existence so
different from anything with which he had connected her. Varick,
whatever his faults, was a gentleman, in the conventional,
traditional sense of the term: the sense which at that moment
seemed, oddly enough, to have most meaning to Waythorn. He and
Varick had the same social habits, spoke the same language,
understood the same allusions. But this other man...it was
grotesquely uppermost in Waythorn's mind that Haskett had worn a
made-up tie attached with an elastic. Why should that ridiculous
detail symbolize the whole man? Waythorn was exasperated by his own
paltriness, but the fact of the tie expanded, forced itself on him,
became as it were the key to Alice's past. He could see her, as Mrs.
Haskett, sitting in a "front parlor" furnished in plush, with a
pianola, and a copy of "Ben Hur" on the centre-table. He could see
her going to the theatre with Haskett--or perhaps even to a "Church
Sociable"--she in a "picture hat" and Haskett in a black frock-coat,
a little creased, with the made-up tie on an elastic. On the way
home they would stop and look at the illuminated shop-windows,
lingering over the photographs of New York actresses. On Sunday
afternoons Haskett would take her for a walk, pushing Lily ahead of