“Oh, mother, why did you not wait for me to go with you?” “Well, my dear, the bit of glass in my hand made me remember the exhibit; and as I had heard Gerard say the Van Sants were going to send some portraits, I suddenly resolved to visit the rooms and see if Annette St. Ange’s was among them. And there I saw it--very conspicuously placed also; a wonderfully lovely presentment of a lovely girl.” “But was it like her?” “It was not like the Mrs. St. Ange I remember. The portrait represented a fairylike beauty, dainty, exquisite, with the bluest eyes and the palest golden hair imaginable; an air of indefinable coquetry and grace; and a slight, girlish figure clothed in white from head to feet. But the Mrs. St. Ange that used to visit my mother was very different. She was always in black, her eyes were not pretty or expressive, her hair had lost all its glow, and her slight figure became round and heavy. She was also sad-looking. I do not recollect her smiling. She seemed full of care. Still there were points of resemblance, when you looked for them; and you may be sure the bright, lovely girl did not become the sad, hard-looking woman without many and long-continued trials.” “She ought not to have married a foreigner. They do not understand American women; and then one or the other goes to the wall.” “In the St. Ange case, it was Annette. Her husband was soft as velvet and hard as iron. In some way she lost her grip of the situation, and when men go one step beyond their right they go too far. He never said an impolite word to her; also, he ceased saying a loving word. She became afraid of him, nervous, diffident, and suspicious. He had only to remark in the blandest way that she was losing her fine manners, and she lost them. In his presence she did herself no justice. He looked critically at her, slightly shrugged his shoulders, and she was as awkward as he considered her. In five years no one would have known the once sarcastic, clever, authoritative Annette de Vries. She had subsided. She was forgotten; and she hardly knew how to frame a complaint of the way in which this condition had been brought about. “Fortunately, she found some comfort in her house and her children, but Mr. St. Ange took no apparent interest in either. It was a lonely pleasure. He was disappointed because the three girls were not three boys. He spent very little time in his home, preferring one or other of the clubs of which he was a member.” “I think he was simply--a brute.”