“If he threatens you with divorce on such a ground he himself is likely to be adjudged mentally unsound.  It was a brutal, stupid threat, nothing more; and his insult to your father’s memory was more brutal still.  Don’t be stampeded by such threats.  Disprove them by your calm self-control under provocation; disprove them by your discretion and self-confidence.  Give nobody a single possible reason for gossip.  And above all, Alixe, don’t become worried and morbid over anything you might dread as inheritance, for you are as sound to-day as you were when I first met you; and you shall not doubt that you could ever be anything else.  Be the woman you can be!  Show the pluck and courage to make the very best out of life.  I have slowly learned to attempt it; and it is not difficult if you convince yourself that it can be done.”

To this she answered the next day: 

“I will do my best.  There is danger and treachery everywhere; and if it becomes unendurable I shall put an end to it in one way or another.  As for his threat—­incident on my admitting that I did go to your room, and defying him to dare believe evil of me for doing it—­I can laugh at it now—­though, when I wrote you, I was terrified—­remembering how mentally broken my father was when he died.

     “But, as you say, I am sound, body and mind.  I know it; I don’t
     doubt it for one moment—­except—­at long intervals when, apropos of
     nothing, a faint sensation of dread comes creeping.

“But I am sound!  I know it so absolutely that I sometimes wonder at my own perfect sanity and understanding; and so clearly, so faultlessly, so precisely does my mind work that—­and this I never told you—­I am often and often able to detect mental inadequacy in many people around me—­the slightest deviation from the normal, the least degree of mental instability.  Phil, so sensitive to extraneous impression is my mind that you would be astonished to know how instantly perceptible to me is mental degeneration in other people.  And it would amaze you, too, if I should tell you how many, many people you know are, in some degree, more or less insane.

     “But there is no use in going into such matters; all I meant to
     convey to you was that I am not frightened now at any threat of
     that sort from him.

“I don’t know what passed between you and him; he won’t tell me; but I do know from the servants that he has been quite ill—­I was in Westchester that night—­and that something happened to his eyes—­they were dreadful for a while.  I imagine it has something to do with veins and arteries; and it’s understood that he’s to avoid sudden excitement.

“However, he’s only serenely disagreeable to me now, and we see almost nothing of one another except over the card-tables.  Gerald has been winning rather heavily, I am glad to