He petted her as one pets a spoiled and fretful child at the end of a long, long rainy day, with a rainy to-morrow ahead. When they returned home the coziness of their hour together was lost. The big mansion was as cozy as a court-house. It no longer had even novelty. Climbing the steps had no further mystery than the Louvre has to an American tourist who has promenaded through it once. Her room was brilliant and beautiful, but the things she liked about it most were the homely, comfortable touches: her bedroom slippers by her chair, her nightgown laid across her pillow, and the turned-down covers of the bed. Liliane knocked and came in, and Jim retreated. It was pleasant for the indolent Kedzie to have the harness taken from her. She yawned and stretched and rubbed her sides when her corsets were off, and when her things were whisked from sight and she was only Kedzie Thropp alone in a nightgown she was more nearly glad than she had been for ever so long. She flung her hair loose and ran about the room. She sang grotesquely as she brushed her teeth and scumbled her face with cold-cream, rubbed it in and rubbed it out again. She was so glad to be a mere girl in her own flesh and not much else that she went about the room crooning to herself. She peeked out of the window at the Avenue, as quiet as a country lane at this hour, save for the motors that slid by as on skees and the jog-trot of an occasional hansom-horse. She was crooning when she turned to see her husband come in in a great bath-robe; he might have been a solemn monk, save for the big cigar he smoked. He was so dour that she laughed and ran to him and flung him into a chair and clambered into his lap and throttled him in her arms, crying: “Oh, Jim, I am happy. I love you and you love me. Don't we? Say we do!” “Of course we do,” he laughed, not quite convinced. He could not resist her beauty, her warmth, her ingratiation. But somehow he could not love her soul. He had refused to make her his mistress before they were married. Now that they were married, that was all he could make of her. Their life together was thenceforward the life of such a pair. He squandered money on her and let her squander it on herself. They had ferocious quarrels and ferocious reconciliations, periods of mutual aversion and tempests of erotic extravagance, excursions of hilarious good-fellowship, hours of appalling boredom. But there was a curious dishonesty about their relation: it was an intrigue, not a communion. They were never closer to each other than a reckless flirtation. Sometimes that seemed to be enough for Kedzie. Sometimes she seemed to flounder in an abyss of gloomy discontent. But sleep was sweet for her that first night in the bed where the duchess had lain. She had an odd dream that she also became a duchess. Her dreams had a way of coming true. CHAPTER IX