she offended; no man but would try to please her sparing her any need of thought to please him except with herself. But Fidelia knew that, though none might pass her this morning on Michigan Avenue, there were men more implacable than any woman could be in regard to her; there were men whom never could she please, no matter what she did, but to whom, however hard she tried otherwise, she only added offense; and she realized, as she wandered along with her forty dollars, how worse than useless would be a gift if David's father proved to be one of these men.
David met her in their room at noon and when she showed him what she had bought for his mother and sisters, he kissed her and told her that her gifts were just "like her." And how like her they were! How little knowledge they showed of the home to which he was taking her; how little knowledge his wife had, indeed, of himself.
There was an incident at the railroad station, tremendous to David, and which Fidelia did not even suspect. It was his purchase of parlor-car tickets to Itanaca. David had bought Pullman tickets twice previously; but both times under conditions so strange as to call up no comparisons; for the occasions were when he was leaving Streator at noon with his bride and when he and she were returning from their camp to Chicago. But now he was going home on a familiar train made up of half a dozen ordinary day-coaches, in which David Herrick always had traveled, and a parlor car in the rear which he had never entered.
None of his family had ever entered it. Not his father nor his mother nor had his sister Deborah upon
