"Yes," said Loftus, fumbling as he spoke for a cigarette. "But I told you also not to use that expression. Say girl or young woman. If you want to be fantastic, say young gentlewoman, but never young lady. You are right, though. Annandale was to have married a Miss Waldron, but she threw him over and he married somebody else." To Marie all this was inexplicable. She did not understand how a man thrown over by one girl could so speedily marry another. She did not understand, either, what Loftus could be doing with her. To her mind driving presupposed an intimacy which acquaintance might explain but did not excuse. The matter perplexed her, and not unnaturally. It is only through our own heart that it is possible to attempt to read the heart of another. In her heart Marie knew that nothing earthly could induce her to appear as intimate with a man as Loftus had with that woman. Yet, though she knew that, she knew also that many of her views, like many of her expressions, were not in tune with the tone of the set in which Loftus moved. None the less a fact remained. To her other men did not exist. To him other women existed. However she tried to console herself with difference in breeding, that fact, remaining, pricked. It pricked perhaps the harder because of this particular woman's looks. The woman herself was hateful. How, she wondered, could Loftus drive about with her when, with herself, he would barely be seen. And why wouldn't he? In those days Marie's whys were many. But at the end of every one of them the answer which she always found was that it was all because she was not his wife. Yet there always another why recurred. Why was she not what he had sworn she should be? The possible disinheritance which hitherto he had imaginatively displayed had no terrors of any kind for her. On bread and kisses she would have lived with him joyfully in a slum. To luxury she was unused. That with which she was surrounded she would not have missed in the least. On the contrary, it had grown odious to her; it suggested a form of compensation the very thought of which was sickening. It was not for this that she had left Gay street, but for him and an honest name. In the prolonged absence of the latter there were times when her soul seemed to slink into the obscurities of her being and swoon there for shame. There were times when she could not look at herself in the glass. Quite as often she had found it difficult to look at her servants. After the episode in Central Park the increasing sense of degradation affected her so deeply that with a weary idea of preserving such self-respect as she might, summoning those servants she dismissed them--securing, meanwhile, from an agency a woman able to do what little was essential, a negress named Blanche who talked Irish.