“I've always intended to marry a man with a hundred thousand dollars a year. Of course, that's a lot--do you hate me for telling you?--but I wouldn't think of any one with less than fifty--” Arnaud Hallet interrupted quietly, “I have that.” Linda gazed incredulously at his neglected shoes, the wrinkles of his inconsiderable coat and unstudied scarf. She saw that, actually, he had spoken apologetically of his possessions; and a stinging shame spread through her at the possibility that she had seemed common to an infinitely finer delicacy than hers. XIII Most of these circumstances Linda Hallet quietly recalled sitting with her husband in the house that had been occupied by the Lowries'. A letter from Pleydon had taken her into a past seven years gone by; while ordinarily her memory was indistinct; ordinarily she was fully occupied by the difficulties, or rather compromises, of the present. But, in the tranquil open glow of a Franklin stove and the withdrawn intentness of Arnaud reading, her mind had returned to the distressed period of her wedding. Elouise Lowrie--Amelia was dead--sunk in a stupor of extreme old age, her bloodless hands folded in an irreproachable black surah silk lap, sat beyond the stove; and Lowrie, Linda's elder child, five and a half, together with his sister Vigné, had been long asleep above. Linda was privately relieved by this: her children presented enormous obligations. The boy, already at a model school, appalled her inadequate preparations by his flashes of perceptive intelligence; while she was frankly abashed at the delicate rosy perfection of her daughter. The present letter was the third she had received from Dodge Pleydon, whom she had not seen since her marriage. At first he had been enraged at the wrong, he had every reason to feel, she had done him. Then his anger had dissolved into a meager correspondence of outward and obvious facts. There was so much that she had been unable to explain. He had always been impatient, even contemptuous, of the emotion that made her surrender to him unthinkable--Linda realized now that it had been the strongest impulse of her life--and, of course, she had never accounted for the practically unbalanced enmity of her mother. The latter had deepened to an incredible degree, so much so that Mr. Moses Feldt, though he had never taken an actual part in it--such bitterness was entirely outside his generous sentimentality--had become acutely uncomfortable in his own home, imploring Linda, with ready tears, to be kinder to her mama. Judith, too, had grown cutting, jealous of Linda's serenity of youth, as her appearance showed the effect of her wasting emotions. Things quite extraordinary had happened: once Linda's skin had been almost seriously affected by an irritation that immediately followed the trace of her powder-puff; and at several times she had had clumsily composed anonymous notes of a most distressing nature.