She had known William Romayne in society. He was rich, he was handsome, and he was very popular; there was that indefinable something about him, manner, magnetism, or tact, which constitutes a kind of dominating charm. He was not the less “somebody” in that he was vaguely understood to be a business man of some sort, with dealings in shares and stocks all over the world--a locality which lent a picturesque haziness to his affairs. Consequently, when he followed Hermia into her new life and asked her to marry him, she passed over the fact that he was five-and-twenty years her senior, and consented with the practical promptitude of a nature for which romance and sentiment were not. For eighteen months she and her husband had lived in a large house in Eaton Square, entertaining and being entertained through two brilliant seasons, which took away any girlishness which Hermia had ever possessed, and gave her qualities which she admired infinitely more. She found her husband very pleasant, very easy to live with, and, after the first six months, quite unexacting. His business took him into the City every day at this time, though, as his wife said, complacently, he was not the least like the ordinary City man; but at the end of the season which followed on the birth of their child he announced that he would have to spend certainly six months, possibly more, in America. He showed no ardent desire to take his wife with him, and his wife had no desire whatever to go. She wanted to spend the rest of the summer at one of the fashionable health resorts, and to winter in Rome. Such an arrangement was accordingly made between them in the simplest, most matter-of-fact way, arguing no shadow of ill-will on either side; and during the four years which had elapsed since then, husband and wife had each gone his or her own way, meeting when occasion served for a month or two at a time, now in London, now in Paris, now in Rome; and presumably finding the arrangement mutually satisfactory. The little boy had been left for the most part to the care of Mrs. Romayne’s cousin, Frances Falconer. Mrs. Romayne regarded him with the careless, half-dormant affection of a woman to whom her child owes nothing but bare life; to whom its arrival in the world has been rather a tiresome interlude, merely, in her round of pleasures and pursuits; who has had no time since, and has seen no occasion to make time, to give it that care which other people, as it seemed to her, could give it quite as well as she; and who is waiting, vaguely, until it shall be “grown up,” to find it interesting.