His eyes wandered from it to linger on her slender white fingers--on the one where a plain band of gold shone eloquently.

It fascinated and angered him; and she saw it, and was delighted.

Her voice had a note of triumph in it as she said, putting the book on the table beside her, "Foolish, isn't it, to be reading how to build beautiful houses"-- she was going to say, "when one will probably never build any house at all." She bethought her that this might sound like a sigh over Dory's poverty and over the might-have-been.
So she ended, "when the weather is so deliciously lazy." "I know the chap who wrote it," said Ross, "Clever--really unusual talent.

But the fashionable women took him up, made him a toady and a snob, like the rest of the men of their set.

How that sort of thing eats out manhood and womanhood!" Just what Dory often said! "My husband says," she answered, "that whenever the world has got a fair start toward becoming civilized, along have come wealth and luxury to smother and kill.