“My dear sir, she gets what she wants, and Henderson is going to the.....
well, look at the lines in his face.  I’ve known Henderson since he
came fresh into the Street.  He’d rarely knife a friend when his first
wife was living.  Now, when you see the old frank smile on his face, it’s
put on.”

It was half-past eight when Mr. Henderson with Mrs. Delancy on his arm led the way to the diningroom.  The procession was closed by Mrs. Henderson and Mr. Delancy.  The Van Dams were there, and Mrs. Chesney and the Chesney girls, and Miss Tavish, who sat on Jack’s right, but the rest of the guests were unknown to Jack, except by name.  There was a strong dash of the Street in the mixture, and although the Street was tabooed in the talk, there was such an emanation of aggressive prosperity at the table that Jack said afterwards that he felt as if he had been at a meeting of the board.

If Jack had known the house ten years ago, he would have noticed certain subtle changes in it, rather in the atmosphere than in many alterations.  The newness and the glitter of cost had worn off.  It might still be called a palace, but the city had now a dozen handsomer houses, and Carmen’s idea, as she expressed it, was to make this more like a home.  She had made it like herself.  There were pictures on the walls that would not have hung there in the late Mrs. Henderson’s time; and the prevailing air was that of refined sensuousness.  Life, she said, was her idea, life in its utmost expression, untrammeled, and yes, a little Greek.  Freedom was perhaps the word, and yet her latest notion was simplicity.  The dinner was simple.  Her dress was exceedingly simple, save that it had in it somewhere a touch of audacity, revealing in a flash of invitation the hidden nature of the woman.  She knew herself better than any one knew her, except Henderson, and even he was forced to laugh when she travestied Browning in saying that she had one soul-side to face the world with, one to show the man she loved, and she declared he was downright coarse when on going out of the door he muttered, “But it needn’t be the seamy side.”  The reported remark of some one who had seen her at church that she looked like a nun made her smile, but she broke into a silvery laugh when she head Van Dam’s comment on it, “Yes, a devil of a nun.”

The library was as cozy as ever, but did not appear to be used much as a library.  Henderson, indeed, had no time to add to his collection or enjoy it.  Most of the books strewn on the tables were French novels or such American tales as had the cachet of social riskiness.  But Carmen liked the room above all others.  She enjoyed her cigarette there, and had a fancy for pouring her five-o’clock tea in its shelter.  Books which had all sorts of things in them gave somehow an unconventional atmosphere to the place, and one could say things there that one couldn’t say in a drawing-room.