love also, and she had sympathized and agreed.  Yet one day, after he had endowed her with the engagement ring, some one, a member of the golf club, came and revealed a tale.  The girl was not “straight.”  She had been, mayhap was even then, “intimate” with other men—­one anyhow.  She was in love with Peter well enough, as she insisted afterward, and willing to undertake the life he suggested, but she had not broken with the old atmosphere completely, or if she had it was still not believed that she had.  There were those who could not only charge, but prove.  A compromising note of some kind sent to some one was involved, turned over to Peter.

“Dreiser,” he growled as he related the case to me, “it serves me right.  I ought to know better.  I know the kind of woman I need.  This one has handed me a damned good wallop, and I deserve it.  I might have guessed that she wasn’t suited to me.  She was really too free—­a life-lover more than a wife.  That home stuff!  She was just stringing me because she liked me.  She isn’t really my sort, not simple enough.”

“But you loved her, I thought?”

“I did, or thought I did.  Still, I used to wonder too.  There were many ways about her that troubled me.  You think I’m kidding about this home and family idea, but I’m not.  It suits me, however flat it looks to you.  I want to do that, live that way, go through the normal routine experience, and I’m going to do it.”

“But how did you break it off with her so swiftly?” I asked curiously.

“Well, when I heard this I went direct to her and put it up to her.  If you’ll believe me she never even denied it.  Said it was all true, but that she was in love with me all right, and would change and be all that I wanted her to be.”

“Well, that’s fair enough,” I said, “if she loves you.  You’re no saint yourself, you know.  If you’d encourage her, maybe she’d make good.”

“Well, maybe, but I don’t think so really,” he returned, shaking his head.  “She likes me, but not enough, I’m afraid.  She wouldn’t run straight, now that she’s had this other.  She’d mean to maybe, but she wouldn’t.  I feel it about her.  And anyhow I don’t want to take any chances.  I like her—­I’m crazy about her really, but I’m through.  I’m going to marry little Dutchy if she’ll have me, and cut out this old-line stuff.  You’ll have to stand up with me when I do.”

In three months more the new arrangement was consummated and little Dutchy—­or Zuleika, as he subsequently named her—­was duly brought to Newark and installed, at first in a charming apartment in a conventionally respectable and cleanly neighborhood, later in a small house with a “yard,” lawn front and back, in one of the homiest of home neighborhoods in Newark.  It was positively entertaining to observe Peter not only attempting to assume but assuming the role of the conventional husband, and exactly nine months after he had been married, to the hour, a father in