Thaddeus was an airy theorist. Besides, he seemed to be mainly interested in his commission, which perhaps would not accrue if Helen went off with her capital of happiness independently. Searching through her experience, she was not sure how much that she found bore on the subject. It had not seemed a question of courage when she had first girded up her garments and followed where she was led. It had seemed inevitable. Jack's name was the whole dictionary, and there appeared to be no word entirely outside of it. And then the awakening; a series of chasms opening, the bright world breaking up, and sections of it tumbling down the black chasms. She seemed to see his face, with its large, mobile mouth, painted against Thaddeus's fireplace, as he had looked when he had left her that last day in the early morning; heard his laugh, and the echo in the empty hall of the door that had closed behind him. "I'm afraid I have had almost enough of adventures. When I came back to live here I was very tired." "Are you going to tell me?" said Helen, in an awed tone. "Perhaps not everything. But you know I was born here, and my name was Ulic, and all that, till I was married. Mr. Mavering came to Hamilton when I was about your age, and I think he was looking for anything that would interest him, but not expecting it would interest him very long. He had a great deal of money then, but he has done all sorts of things with it, and I don't know that he has any now. I suppose he was engaged in what your uncle calls 'the pursuit of happiness,' and he seemed to be successful. He got so much amusement wherever he went, and his way of doing it was--some of it--expensive. But perhaps it cost me more than any one else, unless--but I don't know about that. He was very clever, and I thought him wonderful. I think he must have been a little extraordinary. I thought no one else had a lover who paid such compliments. He used to say, 'Life is a joke between God and the devil. You are a bright remark by the former, Rachel, and I am the latter's repartee.' He never tried to conceal anything about himself. Then we went adventuring. You see, my story turns on Jack's being so queer--at least, his coming to seems so to me. I couldn't like things and people that were evil and coarse, or like being always dragged into the danger of some kind of disgrace. You can't, if you have been taught to be scrupulous. But he did not seem to see differences between good and bad, and refined and coarse, or else he thought them petty differences. He liked almost anything except being dull. We went from place to place, and across the sea and back again. He was restless--and reckless. I think he was too reckless of me. Once we had a house at New Orleans, where the planters used to come and play cards, and there were queer women with very dark eyes, and some of the planters were quite old men. But one night one of the women killed a planter with a knife, on the stairs.