Yet, by the time Patty returned from taking the waters in the North, he was so lonely for her that their reunion was another and a first marriage. He found a fresh delight in her company and learned the new dances to keep her in his sight and out of the arms of other men. By one of Nature’s mysterious dispensations, this girl with the soul of a flirt and a gadabout had the bodily fertility of a great mother. To her frank and hysterical disgust heaven sent her a second proof of its bounty, which she received with an ingratitude that dazed her husband—and frightened him, lest its influence be visited on the next hostage to fortune. If the child should inherit the moods of its mother it would come into the world like another Gloster, with hair and teeth and a genius for wrath. But the child arrived so placidly that the doctor could hardly wring a first cry from him by slapping him and dipping him into a tub of cold water. And he wept almost never. What he had he wanted. When it was taken from him he wanted it no more. He chuckled and glowed in his cradle like a little brook. He gave up his mother’s breast for a bottle with such lack of peevishness that it was almost an act of precocious gallantry. They named him Keith after an uncle. Keithkins, as too often happens in a world of injustice, made it so convenient to neglect him that his chivalry must be its own and only reward. Patty left him in the country—“for his own good”—and went earlier to New York than in the other autumns. There she plunged into a whirlpool of recklessness. She seemed to welcome every other beau but her husband. She would not even flirt with him. She said he was too dangerous! She laughed at his jealous protests against the worthless company she affected. But when he courted her she fought him. Her extravagance in the shops alarmed him, but when he quarreled with her on that score, and demanded that she cease to smirch his credit with debts upon the merchants’ books, she would run away from home and stay until he sought her out in Park Place, where she was wheedling her father into ruinous indulgence. The old man’s business was prospering and his gifts to Patty were hardly so much generosities as gestures of magnificence. Harry Chalender was constantly seen with old Jessamine. They talked the Croton project, but RoBards felt this to be only a tinsel pretext of Chalender’s to keep close to Patty. By the gods, he even infected her with his talk of water-power! Everybody was talking it now. It had become politics. For sixty years or so the town had dilly-dallied over a water supply—ever since the Irishman Christopher Colles had persuaded the British governor Tryon to his system of wells and reservoirs. Every year a bill was put forward, and the Wars of the Roses were mimicked in the Wars of the Rivers.