I Ruyler sighed as he heard his wife walk down the hall.

There had been a time when she came running like a child at his summons, but in these days she walked with a leisurely dignity which to his possibly morbid ear betrayed a certain crab-like disposition in her little high heels to slip backward along the polished floor.
She came in smiling, however, and kissed him quickly and warmly.

Her extraordinary hair hung down in two long braids, their blue blackness undulating among the soft folds of her thin pink negligee.

For the first time Ruyler realized that pink was Helene's favorite color; she seldom wore anything else except white or black, and then always relieved with pink.

And why not, with that deep pink blush in her white cheeks, and the velvet blackness of her eyes?
People still raved over Helene Ruyler's "coloring," and Price told himself once more as she stood before him, her little head dragged back by the weight of her plaits, her slender throat crossed by a narrow line of black velvet, that he had married one of the most beautiful girls he had ever seen.
He was seized with a sudden sharp pang of jealousy and caught her in his arms roughly, his gray eyes almost as black as hers.
"Tell me," he exclaimed, and the new fear almost choked him, "does any other man interest you--the least little bit ?" She stared at him and then burst into the most natural laugh he had heard from her for months.