He had never taken her politics seriously--why should he?
With her head on his shoulder he had listened to her extravagant diatribes against the North.

He had forgiven her outrageous indictment of his caste and his associates for the sake of the imperious but handsome lips that uttered it.

But when he was compelled to listen to her words echoed and repeated by her friends and family; when he found that with the clannishness of her race she had drawn closer to them in this controversy,--that she depended upon them for her intelligence and information rather than upon him,--he had awakened to the reality of his situation.

He had borne the allusions of her brother, whose old scorn for his dependent childhood had been embittered by his sister's marriage and was now scarcely concealed.

Yet, while he had never altered his own political faith and social creed in this antagonistic atmosphere, he had often wondered, with his old conscientiousness and characteristic self-abnegation, whether his own political convictions were not merely a revulsion from his domestic tyranny and alien surroundings.
In the midst of this gloomy retrospect the coupe stopped with a jerk before his own house.