He was in the best of spirits; indeed, to John Gault's suspicious eye he had the triumphant air of a man who had found a good thing. He came into the office with a jaunty tread and an alert, all-embracing glance, and left it showering smiles and bows on its chief and his clerks. The sun of his prosperity seemed to have warmed and brightened him in every way. He told inimitable stories of the early days, which--unhampered by the presence of his daughter--were less egotistical, and not always so conventional, as those he regaled Gault with at home. He was as pressing as ever in his invitations to call, and into these introduced Viola's name as being a participator with himself in the desire of seeing their mutual friend as often as his time and inclination would lead him to the house near South Park. After this visit the vague irritation and moodiness that Gault had felt gave place to a poignant sense of uncertainty and doubt. Naturally of a suspicious nature, the life he had led, the surroundings in which he had passed from youth to maturity, the large experience of evil gained in a twenty years' residence in a thoroughly loose and lawless city, had intensified his original tendency till he was now prone to suspect where suspicion was either a folly or an insult. He had the vain man's dread of being fooled, imposed upon, made ridiculous, and he was proud of his keenness in detecting such intentions. At twenty-two he had come from Harvard to San Francisco, had plunged into the fashionable life of the day, and being the son of wealthy and well-known parents, had quickly learned the bitter lessons which society teaches its followers. People said John Gault had never married because he believed in no woman. This was an aspersion upon his sound, if narrow, common sense. He was afraid of marriage, of a terrible disillusionment, followed by a life-time of conventionally correct misery. What he feared in it was himself. He dreaded that he might not make the woman he married happy, and deep in his soul he cherished the same dream as Balzac, who once wrote: "To devote myself to the happiness of a woman has been my ceaseless dream, and I suffer because I have not realized it." With the passage of the years he had grown narrower and more ambitionless. When he met Viola Reed he was sinking into the dull apathy of a self-engrossed and purposeless middle age.