Moreover, those first days he spent after the convention have chipped the suavity from his countenance, and have written upon the bland, complacent face all the cynicism of his nature. Triumph makes cynicism arrogant, so the man is losing his mask. His nature is leering out of his eyes, snarling out of his mouth, and where the little, lean lines have pared away the flesh from his nose, a greedy, self-seeking pride is peering from behind a great masterful nose. Thomas Van Dorn should be in the adolescence of maturity; but he is in the old age of adolescence. His skin has no longer the soft olive texture of youth; it is brown and mottled and leathery. His lips--his lips once full and red, are pursing and leadening. Thus the pair go through the May twilight; and when the electric lights begin to flash out at the corners, thus the Van Dorns ride before the big black mass of the temple of love that looms among the young trees upon the lawn. The woman alights from the trap. She pauses a moment upon the stone block at the curbing. The man makes no sign of moving. She takes the dog from the seat, and puts it on the ground. The man gathers the reins tightly in his hands, then drops them again, lights his cigar, and says behind his hands: "I'm going back downtown." "Oh, you are?" echoes the woman. "Yes, I am," replies the man sharply. The woman is walking up the wide parking, with the dog. She makes no reply. The man looks at her a second or two, and drives away, cutting the horse to a mad speed as he rounds the corner. Through the wide doors into the broad hall, up the grand staircase, through the luxurious rooms goes the high Priestess of the Temple of Love. It is a lonely house. For it is still in a state of social siege. So far as Harvey is concerned, no one has entered it. So they live rather quiet lives. On that May evening the mistress of the great house sits in her bed room by the mild electric, trying book after book, and putting each down in disgust. Philosophy fails to hold her attention--poetry annoys her; fiction--the book of the moment, which happened to be "The Damnation of Theron Ware," makes her wince, and so she reaches under the reading stand, and brings out from the bottom of a pile of magazines a salacious novel filled with stories of illicit amours. This she reads until her cheeks burn and her lips grow dry and she hears the roll of a buggy down the street, and knows that it must be nearly midnight and that her mate is coming. She slips the book back into its place of concealment, picks up "The Harmonious Universe," and walks with some show of grandeur in her trailing garments down the stairs to greet her lord. "You up?" he asks. He glances at the book and continues: "Reading that damn trash? Why don't you read Browning or Thackeray or--if you want philosophy Emerson or Carlyle? That's rot." He puts what scorn he can into the word rot, and in her sweetest, falsest, baby voice the woman answers: