"Have you been doing this ever since—?" I nodded. "It’s the job I told you I might get. I did get it; and so—" "Have you liked it?" "Extremely." "Is that true, or is it just—? "No; it’s true. I could have had better jobs. They offered two or three times to make me a salesman; you may remember that I knew a good deal about rugs already—; but I preferred to stay where I am." "For what reason?" "I hardly know that I can tell you, unless it was to—to—" "To find your soul?" "Possibly." "And have you found it?" "I’ve found—something. I’m not sure whether it’s my soul or not." All this was said within the space of perhaps two minutes, during which I watched Mrs. Averill and Mrs. Mountney, toward whom Mildred turned her back, putting their head together on a whispered conversation. That it was about me I could have gathered from their glances; but a little crow on the part of Mrs. Mountney left me no doubt about it. "Jasper Soames! Why, that’s the name—" It was all I caught; but it was enough to put even Mildred Averill on a secondary plane. "If you’ve found your soul—" she was saying. "Oh, I’m not sure of that. I only feel that I’ve found—something. I mean that something has come, or gone, I’m not sure of which; only that—" Mrs. Mountney wheeled suddenly from the piano, trotting back to the edge of the carpet, across which she spoke to me. "Did you ever hear of Copley’s great portrait of Jasper Soames?" I nodded, speechlessly. I had heard of it. In my mind’s eye I saw it, at the head of a great staircase, a full-length figure, wearing knee-breeches of bottle-green satin, a gold-embroidered waistcoat, and a long coat of ruby velvet with a Russian sable collar falling back almost to the shoulders. A plate let into the foot of the frame bore the name _Jasper Soames_, with the dates of a birth and a death. Somewhere in my life the picture had been a familiar object. I had no time to follow up this discovery before Mrs. Mountney began again: "Are you one of his descendants?" "No; but my wife is." The reply came out before I realized its significance. I hardly knew what I had said till I heard Lulu Averill exclaim with as much indignation as her indolent tones could carry: "But you told my husband that you were not a married man! Didn’t he, Mildred?" The situation was so unexpected that I felt myself like a bird swinging in a cage. Nothing was steady; everything around me seemed to whirl. Then I heard Mildred speaking as if her voice reached me through a poor connection on a telephone. "Oh, that didn’t matter. I knew he was married all along—at least I was pretty sure of it. What difference could it make to us? "It made the difference," Mrs. Averill drawled, peevishly, "that we believed him." But Mrs. Mountney intervened, waving the others aside with a motion of the arm. "Wait!" She looked at me again across the carpet. "If you married a descendant of Jasper Soames then it was Violet Torrance."