The other waved these last words aside. "Now about this celebration," he said, "what do you say to asking Miss Short to go with us?" Again Rachel forced herself to express pleasure. When Simon Hart went out to call a carriage, she entered the inner room. After ridding herself of her wet dress, she sat down before the cracked looking-glass and began arranging her hair. But almost immediately she folded her arms on the bureau, bowed her head upon them and fell to weeping. In the depths of her soul she felt that nothing could alter her despair. Henceforth the knowledge of Emil's marriage would lodge there like a rock heaved into the midst of a stream, and the current of her life would eddy around it. The approach of Nora Gage caused her to lift her face and continue coiling her hair. Simon Hart was not a worldly man. He confined himself closely to the supervision of his business--the manufacture and sale of jewellery. At night he returned to his austere house in Washington Square. Of a painfully reticent disposition, he made few friends, his fastidious and slightly ironical manner effectually cutting him off from companionship. The only beings who played any sustained part in his life were the gaunt mysterious female who served his meals and arranged his drawing-room as she chose, his old father who moved optical instruments over the floor of the attic; and, at the shop, Victor Mudge, who designed special settings for gems. For Victor Mudge, Simon entertained a particular regard, though he felt sensitively that the goldsmith disapproved of him. The truth was, these two friendless men,--the one living in his well-nigh empty house, the other in his hall bedroom,--criticized each the other's lonely condition. The diversion created in the jeweller's life by the persons just named was no more than the gnawing of a bevy of mice in an otherwise quiet cellar. Painfully aware of this, he attempted to enrich his existence by extending the scope of his intellectual pursuits. He took up the study of social economics and pursued it diligently. In the same way, during the season, he forced himself to attend the opera with conscientious regularity, although he had no real musical taste and much that he saw and heard was in reality distasteful to him. He felt a constant need to check in himself a tendency to indulge feelings that were deeper than those apparently experienced by other men.