It is curious--and scores of Tom Van Dorn's friends wondered at it then and have marveled at it since, that in the six months which elapsed between his divorce and his remarriage, he did not fathom the shallowness and pretense of Margaret Fenn. But he did not fathom them. Her glib talk taken mechanically from cheap philosophy about being what you think you are, about shifting moral responsibility onto good intentions, about living for the present and ignoring the past with the uncertain future, took him in completely. She used to read books to him, sitting in the glow of her red lamp-shade--a glow that brought out hidden hints of her splendid feline body, books which soothed his vanity and dulled his mind. In that day he fancied her his intellectual equal. He thought her immensely strong-minded, and clear headed. He contrasted her in thought with the wife he had put away, told Margaret that Laura was always puling about duty and getting her conscience pinched and whining about it. They agreed sitting there under the lamp, that they had been mates in some far-off jungle, that they had been parted and had been seeking one another through eons, and that when their souls met one of the equations of the physical universe was solved, and that their happiness was the adjustment of ages of wrong. She thought him the most brilliant of men; he deemed her the most wonderful of women, and the devil checked off two drunken fools in his inventory. It was in those halcyon days of his courtship of Margaret Fenn, when he felt the pride of conquest of another soul and body strongly upon him, that Judge Thomas Van Dorn began to acquire--or perhaps to exhibit noticeably--the turkey gobbler gait, that ever afterward went with him, and became famous as the Van Dorn Strut. It was more than mere knee action--though knee action did characterize it prominently. The strut properly speaking began at the tip of his hat--his soft, black hat that sat so cockily upon his head. His head was thrown back as though he had been pulled by a check-rein. His shoulders swung jauntily--more than jauntily, call it insolently--as he walked, and his trunk swayed with some stateliness as his proud hands and legs performed their grand functions. But withal he bowed and smiled--with much condescension--and lifted his hat high from his handsome head, and when women passed he doffed it like a flag in a formal salute, and while his body spelled complacence, his face never lost the charm and grace and courtesy that drew men to him, and held them in spite of his faults.