Presently Marguerite stood before him. Her approaching steps irritated him. Only the other day he had jested about the blessing of his growing blindness—it spared him the sight of Marguerite getting fat! Fat women had always offended his sense of beauty and even now he could not bear the thought that his Marguerite—the slim pretty girl he had first known—was tipping the scale at two hundred pounds. No wonder, that spendthrift had of late thought of nothing but rich food and gaudy clothes. And now while her Albert, nothwithstanding his paralysis, was laboring all day with his pen to provide her wants, she was only thinking of many course dinners and pretty dresses. He had pretended not to notice this. He wished to banish unhappy broodings—his life was unhappy enough without tormenting thoughts. “Who was that girl?” she asked. “Oh, some friend sent her here,” he replied perfunctorily. “In the absence of my secretary she might be of some service to me. She is quite proficient in both French and German.” “She is quite chic—that girl——” For a bare second he made no rejoinder. He seemed to hold his breath. Then he said, with evident constraint, “Rather amiable—and bright.” The next moment he heard her making her toilette preparatory to going out. She was always going out, he was saying to himself with increased irritability. In the past few years this thought frequently crossed his mind, only to be brushed away by a counterthought of sympathy for his poor wife, chained to a corpse. He pitied her, his martyr. Presently as he heard her splashing in the next room, talking loudly to the nurse, and laughing lustily, his irritation grew. He was vexed and angry. He wondered whom she was going to meet. She usually stayed away hours—sometimes almost the whole day—and when he pressed her for an explanation she would burst in tears and say that after she had walked blocks and blocks in order to save cabfare he ill-treated her; and then he would call himself a brute and would reprimand her for her niggardliness. No, he did not want his devoted wife to wear her legs off for the sake of a couple of francs; for even though he was paralyzed he was working and earning as much as many an able-bodied man, he added boastfully. This moment he was sure that she had always lied to him. She was having secret rendezvous. No, no, he was not jealous. A paralyzed man, with a wasted body, could hardly compete with half a million able-bodied men in Paris! he would say to himself cynically. Ah! he did not care whom she was going to meet if she only did not laugh so boisterously. He could not bear that booming, loud laughter of hers coming now from the adjoining room. He was annoyed beyond words. No wonder the young visitor who had just left had mistaken Marguerite for a servant.