"It's a bad story, as bad as it could well be," he resumed. "I see it clearly enough now. I wanted uncle's money, wanted the easy time, and the good things, and all that. Then when I didn't get it, I went in to make a big success and have the things I was after, anyhow. I saw men out there no more able than I who were making a lot of money, and nothing seemed to count so long as somehow you made good. I wanted to make good. It was a pretty cheap ambition." "Yes!" she exclaimed fervently, "cheap! Oh, so cheap!" Nevertheless she did not despise him as she might have despised him at the time of their marriage for his sordid soul. During these eight months that she had lived by herself she had come to see more justly the causes of things--she had grown wiser. She held him now less rigidly, less remorselessly, to her own ideal of life. For she had begun to understand that the poison which had eaten him was in the air he had breathed; it was the spirit of the city where he worked, of the country, of the day--the spirit of greed. It presented itself to men in the struggle for existence at every turn of the road, insidiously and honorably disguised as ambition and courage. She saw the man's temptation to strive with his competitors, as they strove for the things which they held desirable. And she had come to realize that to stand firmly against this current of the day demanded a heat of nature, a character that the man she had married and worshipped, had never possessed. He was of his time neither better nor worse than his fellows, with their appetite for pleasure, their pride--that ancient childish pride of man in the consideration and envy of his kind.... "So you have it all, and it's bad enough, God knows. Nell, can you ever really forgive it, forget it, and love me again?" For answer she leaned toward him and kissed him, understandingly. Now that her heart knew him utterly, with all his cowardice and common failings, she might still love him, even foreseeing the faltering and unideal way of his steps, giving him, like many women, her second love, the love that protects in place of the love that adores. And with that kiss there began for her a new marriage with the man she had seen large in her dreams, the man who had been her hero.... The elms swayed softly in the night wind, brushing across the window by their side. The old house was very still with the subdued calm of age, and man and wife sat there together, without words, looking far beyond them toward the future that was to be theirs. CHAPTER XXX