Then with true feminine instinct she brought the
talk back to its most significant point.
"Why did you ask about his wife?" she inquired of Philip.
"I--I did not know," he returned, so evidently disconcerted that she
did not press the matter.
Had Helen been a gossip she might have added that Rangely had acquired
the reputation of being always philandering with some woman or other.
Before his marriage he had been the slave of Mrs. Staggchase, and now,
after devotion to all sorts of society women, he had come to be counted
as one of the train of admirers who offered their devotion at the
shrine of Mrs. Wilson. Where a Frenchwoman prides herself on the
intensity of the devotion of some man not her husband, an American of
the same type glories in the number of slaves that her charms ensnare.
In either case the root of the matter is vanity rather than passion.
The American fashion is at once the more demoralizing and the less
dangerous. Mrs. Wilson in the early days of her married life had tried
to make her husband jealous by allowing the desperate attentions of a
single lover. She never repeated the experiment.
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