She seldom thought of her own childhood, and she sentimentalized her past only when she reflected on her early girlhood and the instinctive longing for withheld refinements which had led her away from a sordid uncultured home into the profession of a teacher. Often her husband irritated her almost uncontrollably, but she never admitted that the moods he aroused in her had any significance. She was ashamed of him and called the feeling by other names. Mr. Hurst's frustrated vanity consoled itself somewhat when he was alone before his mirror, for even his wife admitted that he was distinguished looking. He consumed bottle after bottle of a prescription which, so a specialist assured him, would make his hair come back. Always gay and affectionate and generally liked, he had a secret sensitiveness that he himself was but half aware of, and which no one who knew him suspected. He had never abandoned the romantic hope that some day he would meet a woman who would understand him. It was his unacknowledged desire to have his wife's opinion of him repudiated that made him perpetually unfaithful to her. Years ago he had been astonished to discover that even the women whom his wife introduced him to, who looked down on his absence of culture, and whose intellectual earnestness really seemed to him grotesque, were quite willing to take him seriously when he made love to them. He was bewildered but elated in perceiving the vulnerability of those he was invited to revere. Once he learned this it awakened something subtle and feminine in his nature and tempted him to unpremeditated cruelties. Though his sex entanglements were, as a rule, gross and banal enough, and quickly succeeded one another, he treasured at intervals a plaintive conviction that some day he would meet the woman who had, as he expressed it, "the guts to love him". Musing on this, he found in it the excuse for all the unpleasing episodes in which he took part. Outwardly cynical, he was sentimental to the point of bathos. He had one fear that obsessed him, the fear of growing old, so that _the_ woman, when she met him, might not be able to recognize him.