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As time passed, it became increasingly difficult for Mr. Sheer to regard his life as an imposture. He still believed that he could “be himself with me, but actually our conversations were more and more taken up with politics, the weather, the women’s dresses, the state of business, till the outlaw …

When he passed into the final stage of his business development and became a partner, Mr. Sheer achieved his ambition—to enter a rich man’s house by the front door, as a guest. First there had been stag evenings with visiting Middle Western businessmen, but before long, at Aiken, at Palm Beach, on …

The word was out at last. I was gratified in a way that Mr. Sheer had admitted the truth, but depressed by the casual, accidental manner in which it had slipped out, as if that “crooked” were taken for granted by Mr. Sheer, accepted by him as an unalterable part of his personality. My vision of a r…

So the three went out for a drink, and she watched with a sort of desperation her husband’s growing abstraction, the more and more perfunctory attention he accorded the conversation she was so bravely sustaining. “He is bored,” she thought. “He is going to leave.” The prospect of being left alone w…

SHE COULD NOT BEAR to hurt her husband. She impressed this on the Young Man, on her confidantes, and finally on her husband himself. The thought of Telling Him actually made her heart turn over in a sudden and sickening way, she said. This was true, and yet she knew that being a potential divorcee …