The rebuff of unaccepted love she had faced gallantly; its accompanying knowledge of shame and pity and sympathy, had only steadied her; even her own irrationality in disliking Laura (she had recognized with chagrin that dislike was irrational, and she hated, she told herself, to be an idiot!)--all these emotional experiences had merely deepened and humanized her. But the discovery that the Howard Maitland she thought she knew, had never lived, was a staggering blow. The other Howard--the real Howard--honest, sweet-hearted, simple, who had found her conversation no end amusing and interesting, who had been a patient receptacle for her opinions and an amiable echo of her volubility, who had swallowed many yawns out of kindness as well as courtesy--the Howard beneath whose charm of good manners lurked the primitive fierceness of the male who protects his woman at any cost, _that_ Howard had never made the slightest appeal to her. The jar of stepping down from the ideal man to the real man racked her, body and soul. The old pain of not being loved had ceased as suddenly as a pulled tooth ceases to ache. The new pain was only a sense of nothingness. But, curiously enough, it was then that the old affection for Laura began to flow back. "Not that I get much out of her," she thought, dully; "dear little Lolly! She hasn't an idea beyond--him. She's a perfect slave to him. Well! I'm glad I'm a free woman! But she's a dear little thing." The soreness had all gone; she loved Lolly again--as one loves a kitten. She used to go to see her, and look at the baby clothes, and speculate as to whether it would be a girl or a boy. The softness, and silliness, and sweetness of it all was to her tired mind what cushions are to a tired body. When the baby was born, early in September, the last barrier between the cousins was swept away--but Fred still made a point of not going to Laura's house at an hour when she was likely to find Howard at home. Laura's husband was an entire stranger to her. When, by accident, she did meet him, she used to say to herself, wonderingly, "How _could_ I--?" All summer Frederica went regularly to her office. "But business isn't what you'd call booming," she told Arthur Weston. In the blind fumbling about of her stunned mind to discover a reality, he was the one person to whom she turned. His calls at 15 Payton Street, whenever Fred was in town, stirred even Mrs. Payton to speculation--although it was Miss Carter who put the idea into her head: "He always comes when Miss Freddy is here; _I_ think he's taken with her." "I wish I could think so! There is nothing I should like better," said Mrs. Payton, sighing. But the mere hope of such a thing roused her to ask Mr. Weston to dinner whenever she knew that Fred was coming home for the night. Miss Graham, getting wind of those dinners, gave him, one day, a cousinly thrust in the ribs: "Tortoise! I do really believe you have some sense, after all!"