At the time of which I write it was a great comfort to me to get away from my own dreary professionalism, to the nursery at Evanston, or to add my small flourish to the _scene à faire_ of Henry's homecoming, made every day to seem the one event for which the household waited, from which, indeed, it took its excuse for being. For all of this was so well in line with what Henry, who with the amplification of his income had taken on a due rotundity of outline and a slight tendency to baldness, conceived as proper for a man's home to be, that he played up to it as much as was in him. He had still his air of knowingness about the theatre, and if there was at times in his manner a suggestion that he might have found it pleasanter to adjust his relation to me on the basis of what I was as an actress, if I had not been quite so much the friend, it was so far modified by his genuine admiration for his wife and his cession to her of every right of judgment in the home, that I was inclined to accept him at his own and Pauline's estimate as the model husband. It was only a few days before my visit to Gerald McDermott, that I had undertaken to state to Pauline the nature of the help I required and my title to it. I had gone out to dinner and found her putting on a new gown, one of those garments admirably contrived between the smartness of evening dress and the intimacy of negligée, in which Evanston ladies of that period were wont to receive their lords. "I'm needing something new myself," I said for a beginning, "and I'm divided between the certainty that if I don't get an engagement I can't afford it, and if I don't afford it I probably won't get an engagement." Pauline stopped in the process of hooking up, to take stock of me. "You absurd child!" The note of amused admonition with which she ordinarily accepted my professional exigencies turned on the note of correction. "Don't you think you put too much stress on those things?" "What things?" She had touched upon the spring of irritation. "Clothes, you know, and appearances. Isn't it better just to do your work well and rest upon that?" "Pauline, if you had ever looked for an engagement you would know that getting it is largely a matter of appearing equal to it, and clothes are the better part of appearing." "But if you know that your work is good, what do you care what people think of you?" I dodged the moral situation about to be precipitated on me. "It's about the only way you know it is good, knowing what people think of it." "Now see here," Pauline protested, reinforced by the evident superiority of her viewpoint to mine, "you're getting all wrong; these things you are thinking of, they are not the real things; they don't count, not in the long run; it's only the spiritual things that really matter." She had put on all the plastic effect of nobility that was part of her stock in trade with Henry Mills. I thrust out against it sharply.