"Here's Archie now," she remarked, observing her lord coming up the drive in his car. "Hello, Archie!" Irene called in greeting. Her tone was quite friendly and intimate. Archie certainly had been "accepted" in this quarter. "Going to the Carharts?" Archie, of course, was going to the Carharts to dine and play cards. "Coming, Dell?" he asked his wife casually. Adelle shook her head. "I've been telling Dell she ought not to be so lazy," Irene commented. "She never goes off the place if she can help it!" "Adelle don't like people," Archie observed gloomily. "Yes I do, well enough," his wife protested. "It's a queer way you have of showing it, then." "Why should I like 'em, anyway, if I don't want to?" she retorted with some heat, childishly eager to put herself in the right. "That's just it," Irene commented. "I tell her some day she will want people, and she will find it isn't easy to have them then.... Besides, it's her duty to take her part--everybody must." Adelle made a bored gesture and filched a cigarette from Archie's case. "Go on, you two, and have a good time," she said amiably. And presently Archie departed with Irene, driving her back to Bellevue in his own car. As Adelle watched them depart from the veranda, very companionably, in close conversation, she smiled, perhaps because she knew that they were still talking about her and her social delinquency, perhaps because it amused her to think how thoroughly Irene had revised her opinion of the "red-headed bounder." In the still twilight her quiet mind speculated upon many things--the friendship between Archie and Irene, the obsession most people seemed to have to get together in one way or another, Irene's creed of "taking your place in the world,"--possibly even the purpose and meaning of life in general, although Adelle would scarcely recognize her meditations under those terms.... In the end she went up softly to her baby's room and spent a long time in examining minutely the child's features. Now that she had discovered all the delights of maternity she wondered at herself for having been so indifferent to this great power latent in her of creating life, and determined to have other children as soon as possible. As a matter of course she thought of Archie as their father, but it was only in that way that she thought of him at all, if she did happen to think of him. A husband was the necessary means of fulfilling her new desire to have her own young. XXXIII That summer while the new house was going up they went back to Europe for a few months, as it was too hot on the ranch and they had nothing better to do. They also meant to buy furniture, rugs, pictures, and other material for the new home which they expected would be their permanent abiding-place....