III.
During the next three months Mather thought back through many years. He had had an unusually happy life. Those frictions between man and man, between man and society, which harden most of us into a rough and cynical quarrelling trim, had been conspicuous by their infrequency in his life. It had never occurred to him before that he had paid a price for this immunity, but now he perceived how here and there, and constantly, he had taken the rough side of the road to avoid enmity or argument, or even question.
There was, for instance, much money that he had lent privately about thirteen hundred dollars in all, which he realized, in his new enlightenment, he would never see again. It had taken Jaqueline’s harder, feminine intelligence to know this. It was only now when he owed it to Jaq
