In her day she had truly loved him, for she had been a wise observer of men and affairs, and Lester had always appealed to her as a real man. He was so sane, she thought, so calm. He was always intolerant of sham, and she liked him for it. He was inclined to wave aside the petty little frivolities of common society conversation, and to talk of simple and homely things. Many and many a time, in years past, they had deserted a dance to sit out on a balcony somewhere, and talk while Lester smoked. He had argued philosophy with her, discussed books, described political and social conditions in other cities—in a word, he had treated her like a sensible human being, and she had hoped and hoped and hoped that he would propose to her. More than once she had looked at his big, solid head with its short growth of hardy brown hair, and wished that she could stroke it. It was a hard blow to her when he finally moved away to Chicago; at that time she knew nothing of Jennie, but she felt instinctively that her chance of winning him was gone. Then Malcolm Gerald, always an ardent admirer, proposed for something like the sixty-fifth time, and she took him. She did not love him, but she was getting along, and she had to marry some one. He was forty-four when he married her, and he lived only four years—just long enough to realize that he had married a charming, tolerant, broad-minded woman. Then he died of pneumonia and Mrs. Gerald was a rich widow, sympathetic, attractive, delightful in her knowledge of the world, and with nothing to do except to live and to spend her money. She was not inclined to do either indifferently. She had long since had her ideal of a man established by Lester. These whipper-snappers of counts, earls, lords, barons, whom she met in one social world and another (for her friendship and connections had broadened notably with the years), did not interest her a particle. She was terribly weary of the superficial veneer of the titled fortune-hunter whom she met abroad. A good judge of character, a student of men and manners, a natural reasoner along sociologic and psychologic lines, she saw through them and through the civilization which they represented. “I could have been happy in a cottage with a man I once knew out in Cincinnati,” she told one of her titled women friends who had been an American before her marriage. “He was the biggest, cleanest, sanest fellow. If he had proposed to me I would have married him if I had had to work for a living myself.” “Was he so poor?” asked her friend. “Indeed he wasn’t. He was comfortably rich, but that did not make any difference to me. It was the man I wanted.” “It would have made a difference in the long run,” said the other. “You misjudge me,” replied Mrs. Gerald. “I waited for him for a number of years, and I know.”