Therefore, Dan had decided, after very arduous sophistry, it was not wrong to see Thurley, to keep her in his bewildered heart as a sort of lovely idol, something set apart from the Corners and his house-and-garden life—something as different as the scarlet tanager or the jewelled dragon-fly is different from the barn-swallow or the field-daisy! Each has its own place. But when spring began to hint of its appearance and Dan had been in New York over Easter, while the Corners gossiped about his absence, although Lorraine bravely occupied the front church pew and wore her new silk gown, Dan came home prepared to tell Lorraine that he would probably be away very often during the summer. He waited until the work was “done up” and Lorraine brought her everlasting handiwork to join him in the den. The den itself was sufficient to make Dan’s nerves rebel—it had been furnished a few months after their marriage, an upstairs bedroom transformed into an inquisition chamber, as he told Thurley. Dens in such hamlets as the Corners offer no _raison d’être_ save when a cartoonist gets a peek at them or the family scapegoat turns up unawares and is made to occupy the combination divan and folding lounge. Lorraine fondly pictured the den as an ideal place for Dan to come and rest—“A real man’s room,” she explained, “where they smoke and play cards—and talk about things!” It was adorned by Indian heads, an oak table with a prim scarf done in poppies and maidenhair fern, a lounge with pillows made from cigar ribbons and college pennants, all placed in undying positions of rectitude, glass candlesticks with pink shades, a shining little ash tray and match box, a shelf of detective stories and old magazines, an easy chair in old rose velours, two fragile rocking chairs, some grinning lithographs of cowboys, African savages, Christy girls and bulldogs placed at exact intervals about the pink flowered walls and dimity curtains criss-crossed and crisp from recent washing to shut out the light! Seated here, this April evening, a hundred thoughts clamoring for consideration before the task of telling Lorraine he was to be in New York a great deal, Dan pretended to play solitaire and keep up a desultory conversation about the way a neighbor trained a pumpkin vine over his woodshed and captured the village improvement prize! The absence of sympathy between them seemed a relentless, chilly wind whipping on his treasonous speech, all the more so because Dan had no truly logical excuse. On the face of it, what more could a man demand? That is, if one were magnanimous about the Indian heads and sofa pillows, what right had he, a small town shopkeeper, to wail his heart out for a genius? “Oh, ’Raine,” he said abruptly, shuffling the cards with a fillip, “I may have to run off for a few days in a couple of weeks—all right?” Lorraine did not answer; she bent her head over her work.