Two days later the girls came to the house to stay until their friends should go to Washington. Briggs wrote to an agent, and a month later he was established with his family in a house that would have seemed ideally comfortable but for the taste of luxury his own house in Washington had given him. Briggs saw that his fears regarding the Burrell girls had been unnecessary. Toward Helen they maintained an air of worshipful devotion that greatly amused him, and they seemed to enjoy being with the children, too. He saw that, in spite of their acquired worldly air, they were really simple country girls, easily abashed and genuinely simple and kind. He grew interested in them and he began to wonder, as he often did in the case of unattached girls, if he could not help them to find husbands. It was a pleasure to him to come home and to hear from Helen about her outings or her calls with the girls during the day. He realized with astonishment that till now Helen had led a rather restricted life, and that he had taken an unconsciously scornful interest in the things she did. At dinner he really enjoyed hearing the girls talk about the people they had met during the day, about the art-exhibits and the teas they had been at, and about the books they had read and the plays they had seen or the operas they had heard. The comments of his wife regarding the books and the plays and the operas surprised him, and made him realize that she lived in a world from which he was shut out. He had been accusing her world of narrowness, but in reality the narrowness existed chiefly in his own mind. At moments he felt a kind of jealousy of her; at other times he was ashamed of the superior attitude he had taken toward her, and he wondered if she had recognized it. The thought of the possibility that she had known of it all along gave a sudden pause to his consciousness like a symptom of sickness.