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46 walking on the downs facing the sea. She was happy, light-hearted. Basil did not worry her. She knew he had an appointment with Mrs. Perry, who intended leaving town soon and seemed to want the portrait finished in a hurry. Very well, let him have appointments! She knew he was flirting with Mrs. Perry, and she felt now a light contempt for him. She, Teresa, had all his heart, she had his happiness in her hand, she knew her own power. In her mood of to-day she recognised it calmly and felt independent of him. For the moment she was free, as she had been before she married, and for some time afterwards. The business on which she was going, too, was a reminder of her bachelor freedom.

Her rooms, in which she had lived very happily alone for a year before her marriage, were high up in an old building on the edge of the roar and rush of the great middle-class business thoroughfare. The endless noise of trolleys and elevated road had not disturbed Teresa. She had liked to live in the midst of this flood of life, as she liked the view from her windows to the west—an endless spread of roofs, chimney-pots, smoke and steam, which did not stain the clear air. She had made herself a little niche in the huge city; and the feeling of its vastness closed her round comfortably. She was as much of it as she wished to be. She regarded it—and so she did, at that time, life in general as a spec-