“Y
OU’LL admit,” Mrs. Delane challenged me, “that Hayley’s perfect.”
Don’t imagine you have yet done with Mrs. Delane, any more than Delane had, or I. Hitherto I have shown you only one side, or rather one phase, of her; that during which, for obvious reasons, Hayley became an obstacle or a burden. In the intervals between her great passions, when somebody had to occupy the vacant throne in her bosom, her husband was always reinstated there; and during these inter-lunar periods he and the children were her staple subjects of conversation. If you had met her then for the first time you
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 would have taken her for the perfect wife and mother, and wondered if Hayley ever got a day off; and you would not have been far wrong in conjecturing that he seldom did.
Only these intervals were rather widely spaced, and usually of short duration; and at other times, his wife being elsewhere engaged, it was Delane who elder-brothered his big boys and their little sister. Sometimes, on these occasions—when Mrs. Delane was abroad or at Newport—Delane used to carry me off for a week to the quiet old house in the New Jersey hills, full of Hayley and Delane portraits, of heavy mahogany furniture and the mingled smell of lavender bags and leather—leather boots, leather gloves, leather luggage, all the aromas that emanate from the cupboards and passages of a house inhabited by hard riders.
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When his wife was at home he never seemed to notice the family portraits or the old furniture. Leila carried off her own regrettable origin by professing a democratic scorn of ancestors in general. “I know enough bores in the flesh without bothering to remember all the dead ones,” she said one day, when I had asked her the name of a stern-visaged old forbear in breast-plate and buff jerkin who hung on the library wall: and Delane, so practised in sentimental duplicities, winked jovially at the children, as who should say: “There’s the proper American spirit for you, my dears! That’s the way we all ought to feel.”
Perhaps, however, he detected a tinge of irritation in my own look, for that evening, as we sat over the fire after Leila had yawned herself off to bed, he glanced up at the armoured image, and said:
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 “That’s old Durward Hayley—the friend of Sir Harry Vane the Younger and all that lot. I have some curious letters somewhere.... But Leila’s right, you know,” he added loyally.
“In not being interested?”
“In regarding all that old past as dead. It is dead. We’ve got no use for it over here. That’s what that queer fellow in Washington always used to say to me....”
“What queer fellow in Washington?”
“Oh, a sort of big backwoodsman who was awfully good to me when I was in hospital ... after Bull Run....”
I sat up abruptly. It was the first time that Delane had mentioned his life during the war. I thought my hand was on the clue; but it wasn’t.
“You were in hospital in Washington?”
“Yes; for a longish time. They didn’t know much about disinfecting wounds in
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 those days.... But Leila,” he resumed, with his smiling obstinacy, “Leila’s dead right, you know. It’s a better world now. Think of what has been done to relieve suffering since then!” When he pronounced the word “suffering” the vertical furrows in his forehead deepened as though he felt the actual pang of his old wound. “Oh, I believe in progress every bit as much as she does—I believe we’re working out toward something better. If we weren’t....” He shrugged his mighty shoulders, reached lazily for the adjoining tray, and mixed my glass of whiskey-and-soda.
“But the war—you were wounded at Bull Run?”
“Yes.” He looked at his watch. “But I’m off to bed now. I promised the children to take them for an early canter tomorrow, before lessons, and I have to have
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 my seven or eight hours of sleep to feel fit. I’m getting on, you see. Put out the lights when you come up.”
No; he wouldn’t talk about the war.
 
It was not long afterward that Mrs. Delane appealed to me to testify to Hayley’s perfection. She had come back from her last absence—a six weeks’ flutter at Newport—rather painfully subdued and pinched-looking. For the first time I saw in the corners of her mouth that middle-aged droop which has nothing to do with the loss of teeth. “How common-looking she’ll be in a few years!” I thought uncharitably.
“Perfect—perfect,” she insisted; and then, plaintively: “And yet—”
I echoed coldly: “And yet?”
“With the children, for instance. He’s everything to them. He’s cut me out
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 with my own children.” She was half joking, half whimpering.
Presently she stole an eye-lashed look at me, and added: “And at times he’s so hard.”
“Delane?”
“Oh, I know you won’t believe it. But in business matters—have you never noticed? You wouldn’t admit it, I suppose. But there are times when one simply can’t move him.” We were in the library, and she glanced up at the breast-plated forbear. “He’s as hard to the touch as that.” She pointed to the steel convexity.
“Not the Delane I know,” I murmured, embarrassed by these confidences.
“Ah, you think you know him?” she half-sneered; then, with a dutiful accent: “I’ve always said he was a perfect father—and he’s made the children think so. And yet
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—”
He came in, and dropping a pale smile on him she drifted away, calling to her children.
I thought to myself: “She’s getting on, and something has told her so at Newport. Poor thing!”
Delane looked as preoccupied as she did; but he said nothing till after she had left us that evening. Then he suddenly turned to me.
“Look here. You’re a good friend of ours. Will you help me to think out a rather bothersome question?”
“Me, sir?” I said, surprised by the “ours,” and overcome by so solemn an appeal from my elder.
He made a wan grimace. “Oh, don’t call me ‘sir’; not during this talk.” He paused, and then added: “You’re remembering the difference in our ages. Well, that’s just why I’m asking you. I want
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 the opinion of somebody who hasn’t had time to freeze into his rut—as most of my contemporaries have. The fact is, I’m trying to make my wife see that we’ve got to let her father come and live with us.”
My open-mouthed amazement must have been mark............