“If you hadn’t started out in life with ideas upside-down, you would really love me in loving me no more than you do now. But ideals and the fixed idea have got to be worked out to the bitter end, as you are fond of remarking. In reality, happiness means a comfortable state of affairs between a man and a woman with plenty of brains, philosophy, and passion, who are wholly congenial in these three matters, and have chucked their illusions overboard. However, we won’t discuss the matter any further at present. How do you like being the sensation of the day?” “Am I?” “Are you? Every newspaper in town had a big story this morning, and of course the news has gone all over the country. Nothing else is to be heard in the trains or in Park Row. Oh, you will have plenty to sustain you. Lots of women would give their heads to be in your place.” He dined with her and remained until eight o’clock. After he had gone, Patience sat for some time lost in a pleasurable reverie. He always left her in a good humour, and she unquestionably loved him. Few women could help loving Morgan Steele. She sighed once as she reflected that love was not the tremendous passion she had once imagined it to be; in all her dreams she had never pictured it as a restful and tranquillising element; but she conceded that Steele’s philosophy was correct. And if he did not inspire her with a mightier passion it was her fault, not his. Miss Merrien had told her of one brilliant newspaper woman who had made a wilful idiot of herself on his behalf, and of a popular and gifted actress who at one time had taken to haunting the “Day” office, much to the enjoyment of his fellow editors and to his own futile wrath. “No,” she thought, “I made a mistake once, and the shock was so great that it either benumbed or stunted me; or else the imaginary me was killed and the real developed. And after such a marriage I doubt if there are depths or heights left in one’s nature.” Then her mind drifted to her predicament, and she wondered that the workings of fear had so wholly ceased. “I suppose it is because that man is going to defend me,” she said, ruthlessly, at last. “They say he could save a man that had been caught driving a knife into another man’s heart with a hammer; so it is quite natural that I should feel safe.” VII