“I am not coming to your omnium gatherums any more,” he said once to Lady Phayre. “I don’t know how to talk to these people. Their ways are natural to them. I have to put them on, and I put them on crooked.” “But you know how to talk to me,” she replied with a smile. “You are different,” he said. “You know who and what I am. You are good enough to take me just as birth and circumstances have made me.” She bent forward and looked him sweetly in the face. “Be to others just as you are to me.” “That’s an utter impossibility!” he exclaimed quickly, with a flash in his eye, at which her face flushed. “Well, perhaps not quite the same,” she said. “But I like you to come occasionally and show yourself at my little receptions. It completes them, you know.” So Goddard withdrew his decision and strove to adapt himself to society ways. But it went sorely against the grain. The hour’s discomfort over, he hurried home, threw his dress-coat on a chair, and smoked a pipe in his shirt-sleeves with feelings of intense relief. Other invitations, which Lady Phayre’s patronage necessarily procured for him, he refused with obstinate persistence. “I do far more good, both to myself and others, if I put in a spare evening at a working-man’s club,” he said to Gleam, who was persuading him to take advantage of social opportunities. The months went by. Goddard worked with a zest which even he had not known before. In the little comedy of their lives Lady Phayre played Egeria with nice discrimination. Daniel imperceptibly acquired the habit of setting forth all his schemes and ambitions for her approval. His strenuous life had been so single-purposed that he had retained many simplicities, and his nature came fresh to receive her sympathy. The first time he handed her the manuscript of a review article he blushed like a schoolboy. It was a pleasant time. He was too ingenuous to suspect pitfalls in his path. His domestic life continued its usual course. Lizzie had spells of soberness and quasi-repentance, alternating with periods of outbreak. These latter, however, were growing more frequent. To Daniel the asperities of everyday existence became more and more external. A dogged, almost Philistine sense of duty kept him uniformly kind and considerate; but he had long since ceased to regard her as one fulfilling any of a wife’s functions.