must be maintained. She knew she did not understand him
thoroughly--"we've been so differently brought up." But she felt
that the kind of life that pleased her and dazzled him must be the
kind he really wished to lead--and would see he wished to lead,
once he extricated himself, with her adroit assistance, from the
kind of life to which his vociferous pretenses had committed him.

Whether her subtleties in furtherance of creating a sane state of
mind in him had penetrated to him, she could not tell. In the
earliest step of their acquaintance she had studied him as a
matrimonial possibility, after the habit of young women with each
unattached man they add to their list of acquaintances. And she
had then discovered that whenever he was seriously revolving any
matter he never spoke of it; he would be voluble about everything
and anything else under the sun, would seem to be unbosoming
himself of his bottommost secret of thought and action, but would
not let escape so much as the smallest hint of what was really
engaging his whole mind. It was this discovery that had set her to
disregarding his seeming of colossal, of fatuous egotism, and had
started her toward an estimate of him wholly different from the
current estimate. Now, was he thinking of their future, or was it
some other matter that occupied his real mind while he talked on
and on, usually of himself? She could not tell; she hoped it was,
but she dared not try to find out.

They were at their mail, which one of the guides had just brought.
He interrupted his reading to burst out: "How they do tempt a man!
Now, there's"--and he struck the open letter in his hand with a
flourishing, egotistic gesture--"an offer from the General Steel
Company. They want me as their chief counsel at fifty thousand a