Matthias believed in the play with all his heart. During the last three weeks he had watched it come to life and assume the form he had dreamed for it, coloured with the rich hues of his imagination and quick with the breath of living drama. And because he possessed in some measure that rare faculty of being able to weigh justly the work of his own hand, and had looked upon this and seen that it was good, he had counted on it to win him that recognition which, more than money, his pride craved--partly by way of some compensation for what it had suffered at the hands of Venetia Tankerville. He was still sore with the hurt of that experience. Privately he doubted whether he would ever wholly recover from it; but the doubt was a very private one, never discovered even to his most sympathetic friends, not even to Helena, whose scorn of her sister-in-law remained immeasurable. Fortunate in having been able to afford those several weeks in the wooded hills of Maine, in their fragrant and passionless silences Matthias had found peace and regained confidence in his old, well-tried, wholesome code of philosophy; which held that though here and there a man ill-used by chance or woman might be found, the world was none the less sound and kind at heart, and good to live in. For all that, he could not easily endure the thought of Venetia's lowering herself to use him to further her love affair with Marbridge; of Venetia going from his arms and lips to the lips and arms of that insolent animal, Marbridge: the one amused by her successful cunning, the other contemptuous in his conquest. And he often wondered with what justice he judged the woman. It comforted him a little, at times, to believe that she had not acted so cruelly altogether as a free agent, to think her meeting with Marbridge in New York a freak of chance and fate, her elopement an unpremeditated and spontaneous surrender to the indisputable magnetism of the man. Marbridge commanded the reluctant admiration of men who did not like him--who knew him too well to like him. How much more easily, then, might he not have overcome the scruples of a girl untutored in the knowledge of her own heart.... Or had it all been due merely to the fact that John Matthias was not a man to hold the love of women? Such men exist, antipathetic to the Marbridges of the world. Was he of their unhappy order, incapable of inspiring enduring love? He could review a modest cycle of flirtations with women variously charming and willing to be amused, light-hearted attachments and short-lived, one and all, those that might have proved more lasting broken off without ill-will on either side--though always by the woman. Venetia alone had named Love to him as if it stood to her for something higher and more significant than the diversion of an empty hour--Venetia who was now in Italy, the bride of Marbridge!