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 a fairly respectable stock-in-trade. Every new book, every new discussion, every new incident furnished fuel to the motor that drove her forward.

But there was one moment, during the Christmas festivities, when the boldness of her recent thoughts, the inhibitive tightness of her new garments of correctitude, the fatigue of standing guard over herself, became intolerably irksome, when she looked away from Keble and Miriam and the Browns towards her tubby, bald-headed, serene little father, twinkling and smoking his beloved pipe before the fire: a moment when she longed to be the capricious, dreamy girl who had curled up at his feet during the winter evenings of her first acquaintance with the English boy from Hillside.

If Keble had divined that mood, if he could have stepped in and caught her out of it with an expert caress, if he had read the thought that was then in her mind,—namely that no amount of cleverness could suppress the yearning that her conjugal experience had so far failed to gratify,—if his eyes had penetrated her and not the flames, where presumably they envisaged the air castles he would soon be translating into stone and cement, then the yards of the matrimonial ship might have swung about, the sails have taken the breeze, and the blind helmsman have directed a course into a sharply defined future. At that moment Louise might have been converted, by a sufficiently subtle lover, into a passionate partner in the most prosaic of schemes. All she needed was