"And they accepted it. More shame for me, more shame for them, more shame for human nature. But _you_ are safe." He viewed Truesdale with an undisguised scorn, and Truesdale did not attempt to withstand it. "I attended the ceremony," Roger said, grimly. "I presented the bride with a bouquet. For the matter of that," he continued, in a scornful jest of himself, "I was the one who took out the marriage license." "Did you pay the minister his fee?" Truesdale asked this principally for the purpose of reasserting himself. "Minister!" cried Roger, half shocked. "No; I had a justice of the peace. I was the guest of honor," he went on, with a savage irony. "With good reason; it was I who paid the bride's dowry." Truesdale sat with his eyes on the floor. "The check; was it--was it a large one?" he asked, in a low voice. "Check!" cried Roger again. "I paid them in hundred-dollar bills." His fingers played back and forth many and many times. "Not so much as that!" exclaimed Truesdale, his eyes opening widely. "More," said Roger. "I put the notices in the newspapers, too. And now, Truesdale," he said, with a final brief phrase of dismissal, "think what your father and I have had to do for you, and try to be a man." And he turned away towards other matters. Truesdale passed out, crestfallen for the first time in his life. Not over his own follies, not over the anxieties and expenditures he had caused his father, but over the fact that Roger had treated him like a boy--and had done it all so briefly. He blushed, too, for the vulgar ending of the episode (if ended, indeed, it were); for it seemed to outrage all literary and artistic precedent. No farce at the Palais Royal had ever developed so grotesque a dénouement; no novel of Véron, of Belot, of Montépin had ever come to so sordid an ending; no Mimi, no Musette could have ever followed a line of conduct so little _spirituel_ as that taken by Sophie Leppin. What, then; were the books wrong, and only life true? No; it was the fault of America itself. "_Quel pays_!" reflected Truesdale; "equally without the atmosphere of art and the atmosphere of intrigue!" This observation pleased him; he felt that he had pierced the marrow of a complicated question, and he passed along the street holding a higher head. He drew a letter from his pocket and creased it thoughtfully in his hands as he walked on. The envelope, from which he did not draw the enclosure, was addressed in the hand of Gladys McKenna. He had parted from her just as he had meant to part--at the carriage door. She had forgiven this, and was now writing in terms no less ardent and clinging than before. "Poor Gladys!" he said, half aloud. "I haven't treated her any too well; yet she is about the only one who cares for me or understands me or appreciates me. I'm glad, though, she's back home; I should be guilty of some horrible _sottise_ or other if she were here."