Lois with "The Woman's Kingdom" in her hand, felt that some source of power and happiness which she had not realized had slipped from her grasp, yet might still be hers. So many disconnected, half-childish thoughts came with the words--historic names of women whom men had loved devotedly, who had kept them as their friends and lovers even when they themselves had grown old, women who had never lost their charm. There were those women of the French salons, who could interest even other generations; queens indeed! She couldn't really interest _one_ man! She thought over the married couples of her acquaintance, in search of those who should reveal some secret, some guiding light. One woman across the street had no other object in life than purveying to the household comfort of her husband, and seemed, good soul, to expect nothing from him in return; if William liked his fish, she was repaid. A couple farther down appeared to be held together by the fact of marriage, nothing more; they were bored to death by each other's society. Another couple were happily absorbed in their children, to whom they were both sacrificially subordinate. With none of these conditions could Lois be satisfied. Then, there were the women who always spoke as if a man were an animal and a woman were not a woman, but a spirit; but Lois was very much a woman! She settled at last, after penetrative thought, on one husband and wife, the latter a plain little person no longer young. Every man liked to go to her charming, comfortable house; every man admired her; and that her husband, a very handsome man himself, admired her most of all was unobtrusively evident. Every look, every gesture, betrayed the charming, vivifying unity between those two. How was it accomplished? How could one interest a man like that? There was Eugene Larue--she could interest him! The thought of him always gave her a sense of conscious power; he paid her homage. She did not know what his relations were with other women, but of his with her she was sure: she felt her woman's kingdom. If you could talk to the soul of a man like that as if he had the soul of an angel, and learn from him what you wanted to know--get his guidance-- But Lois was before all things inviolably a wife, with the instinctive dignity of one. The sympathy between her and Eugene Larue was so deep that she feared sometimes that in some brief moment she might reveal in words, to be forever regretted afterward, conditions which he knew without her telling. To be loved as Eugene Larue would love a woman! But his wife had not cared to be loved that way. She took deep, thoughtful counsel of her heart. If they two, she and Eugene, had met while both were free? The answer was what she had known it would be, else she had not dared to make the test. The man who was her husband was the only man who could ever have been her husband. Justin!