SSCP Systems Security Certified Practitioner All

in One Exam Guide Third Edition Gibson pdf

download

https://ebookgate.com/product/sscp-systems-security-certified-
practitioner-all-in-one-exam-guide-third-edition-gibson/

Get Instant Ebook Downloads – Browse at https://ebookgate.com

Instant digital products (PDF, ePub, MOBI) available
Download now and explore formats that suit you...

CEH Certified Ethical Hacker all in one exam guide 2nd

edition Edition Horton

https://ebookgate.com/product/ceh-certified-ethical-hacker-all-in-one-
exam-guide-2nd-edition-edition-horton/

ebookgate.com

CISSP All in One Exam Guide Fifth Edition Shon Harris

https://ebookgate.com/product/cissp-all-in-one-exam-guide-fifth-
edition-shon-harris/

ebookgate.com

All in one A certification exam guide 3rd ed Edition

Michael Meyers

https://ebookgate.com/product/all-in-one-a-certification-exam-
guide-3rd-ed-edition-michael-meyers/

ebookgate.com

ISC2 Certified Cloud Security Professional CCSP Exam Guide

First Edition Kim Van Lavieren

https://ebookgate.com/product/isc2-certified-cloud-security-
professional-ccsp-exam-guide-first-edition-kim-van-lavieren/

ebookgate.com
CISSP Certified Information Systems Security Professional
Study Guide 2nd Edition Ed Tittle

https://ebookgate.com/product/cissp-certified-information-systems-
security-professional-study-guide-2nd-edition-ed-tittle/

ebookgate.com

Comptia A Certification All In One Exam Guide Exams 220

801 220 802 8th Edition Meyers

https://ebookgate.com/product/comptia-a-certification-all-in-one-exam-
guide-exams-220-801-220-802-8th-edition-meyers/

ebookgate.com

Wireshark Certified Network Analyst Exam Prep Guide Second

Edition Laura Chappell

https://ebookgate.com/product/wireshark-certified-network-analyst-
exam-prep-guide-second-edition-laura-chappell/

ebookgate.com

CWSP Certified Wireless Security Professional Official

Study Guide Exam PW0 204 CWNP Official Study Guides 1st
Edition David D. Coleman
https://ebookgate.com/product/cwsp-certified-wireless-security-
professional-official-study-guide-exam-pw0-204-cwnp-official-study-
guides-1st-edition-david-d-coleman/
ebookgate.com

Eleventh Hour Security Exam SY0 201 Study Guide Ido

Dubrawsky

https://ebookgate.com/product/eleventh-hour-security-exam-
sy0-201-study-guide-ido-dubrawsky/

ebookgate.com
 Contents
1. Cover
2. Title Page
3. Copyright Page
4. Dedication
5. Contents at a Glance
6. Contents
7. Acknowledgments
8. Introduction
9. Exam Objective Map
10. Chapter 1 Security Fundamentals

1. Reviewing the Requirements for SSCP

1. Have One Year of Experience

2. Registering for the Exam
3. Passing the Exam
4. Subscribing to the (ISC)2 Code of Ethics andGetting Endorsed
5. Maintaining Your SSCP Certification

2. Understanding Basic Security Concepts

1. Confidentiality
2. Integrity
3. Availability

3. Exploring Fundamentals of Security

1. Least Privilege
2. Separation of Duties
3. Privacy and Data Sensitivity
4. Defense in Depth
5. Nonrepudiation
6. AAAs of Security
7. Accountability
8. Due Diligence
9. Due Care

4. Chapter Review

1. Questions
2. Answers

11. Chapter 2 Access Controls

1. Comparing Identification, Authentication, andAuthorization

2. Exploring Authentication

1. Three Factors of Authentication

2. Multifactor Authentication
3. Two-Step Verification
4. Reviewing Identification
5. Single Sign-on Authentication
6. Centralized vs. Decentralized Authentication
7. Offline Authentication
8. Device Authentication

3. Implementing Access Controls

1. Comparing Subjects and Objects

2. Logical Access Controls

4. Comparing Access Control Models

1. Discretionary Access Control

2. Non-Discretionary Access Control
3. Access Control Matrix vs. Capability Table

5. Participating in the Identity and Access ManagementLifecycle

1. Identity Proofing
2. Provisioning and Authorization
3. Maintenance and Entitlement
4. De-provisioning
6. Participating in Physical Security Operations

1. Badging
2. Data Center Assessment

7. Chapter Review

1. Questions
2. Answers

12. Chapter 3 Basic Networking and Communications

1. Understanding Use Cases

2. Reviewing the OSI Model

1. The Physical Layer (Layer 1)

2. The Data Link Layer (Layer 2)
3. The Network Layer (Layer 3)
4. The Transport Layer (Layer 4)
5. The Session Layer (Layer 5)
6. The Presentation Layer (Layer 6)
7. The Application Layer (Layer 7)

3. Comparing the OSI and TCP/IP Models

4. Understanding Network Topologies and Relationships

1. Ethernet
2. Bus Topology
3. Star Topology
4. Tree Topology
5. Token Ring Topology
6. Mesh Topology
7. Network Relationships

5. Reviewing Basic Protocols and Ports

1. Comparing IPv4 and IPv6

2. Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol
3. Address Resolution Protocol
4. Network Discovery Protocol
5. Domain Name System
 6. Internet Control Message Protocol
7. Internet Group Message Protocol
8. Simple Network Management Protocol
9. File Transfer Protocol
10. Telnet
11. Secure Shell
12. Hypertext Transfer Protocol and HypertextTransfer Protocol Secure
13. Transport Layer Security and Secure Sockets Layer
14. Network File System
15. Routing Protocols
16. E-mail Protocols
17. Internet Protocol Security
18. Tunneling Protocols
19. Mapping Well-Known Ports to Protocols
20. Comparing Ports and Protocol Numbers

6. Comparing Internetwork Trust Architectures

1. Comparing Public and Private IP Addresses

2. Using NAT
3. Comparing Trust Relationships

7. Exploring Wireless Technologies

1. Securing Data Transmissions

2. Wireless Device Administrator Password
3. Wireless Service Set Identifier
4. MAC Address Filtering
5. Bluetooth
6. NFC
7. GSM
8. 3G, LTE, and 4G
9. WiMAX
10. Radio Frequency Identification
11. Protecting Mobile Devices

8. Chapter Review

1. Questions
2. Answers
13. Chapter 4 Advanced Networking and Communications

1. Managing LAN-based Security

1. Comparing Switches and Routers

2. Physical and Logical Segmentation
3. Secure Device Management
4. VoIP

2. Using Proxy Servers

3. Understanding Firewalls

1. Packet-Filtering Firewall
2. Stateful Inspection Firewall
3. Application Firewall
4. Next-Generation Firewall
5. Defense Diversity
6. Comparing Network-based and Host-basedFirewalls

4. Exploring Remote Access Solutions

1. Risks and Vulnerabilities

2. Tunneling Protocols
3. Authentication
4. Traffic Shaping and WAN Optimization

5. Managing Network Access Control

6. Exploring Virtual Environments

1. Virtualization Terminology
2. Shared Storage
3. Virtual Appliances
4. Virtual Desktop Infrastructure
5. Continuity and Resilience
6. Separation of Data Plane and Control Plane
7. Software-defined Networking
8. Protecting Virtualization Systems

7. Understanding Cloud Computing

 1. Shared Responsibility Models
2. Cloud Operation Models
3. Storage
4. Privacy
5. Data Control and Third-party Outsourcing
6. Compliance

8. Chapter Review

1. Questions
2. Answers

14. Chapter 5 Attacks

1. Comparing Attackers

1. Hackers and Crackers

2. White Hats, Black Hats, and Gray Hats
3. Advanced Persistent Threats
4. Insider Threats
5. Script Kiddies

2. Exploring Attack Types and Countermeasures

1. Basic Countermeasures
2. Spoofing
3. Data Theft
4. DoS
5. DDoS
6. Botnets and Zombies
7. Sniffing Attack
8. Reconnaissance and Fingerprinting Attacks
9. Salami Attack
10. Man-in-the-Middle
11. Replay
12. Session Hijacking
13. DNS Cache Poisoning
14. Smurf and Fraggle Attacks
15. Software Security as a Countermeasure
16. Buffer Overflow Attacks
17. Injection Attacks
18. Cross-Site Scripting
19. Cross-Site Request Forgery
20. Password Attacks
21. Spam
22. Phishing Attacks
23. Phishing and Drive-by Downloads
24. Spear Phishing and Whaling
25. Vishing
26. Smishing
27. Zero Day Exploits
28. Covert Channel
29. Wireless Attacks and Countermeasures

3. Understanding Social Engineering

1. Tailgating
2. Impersonation
3. Skimming
4. Dumpster Diving
5. Shoulder Surfing
6. Social Networking Attacks
7. User Awareness as a Countermeasure

4. Chapter Review

1. Questions
2. Answers

15. Chapter 6 Malicious Code and Activity

1. Identifying Malicious Code

1. Virus
2. Worm
3. Trojan Horse
4. RATs
5. Scareware
6. Ransomware
7. Keylogger
8. Logic Bomb
9. Rootkits
10. Mobile Code
11. Backdoors and Trapdoors
12. Spyware
13. Malware Hoaxes
14. Analyzing the Stages of an Attack

2. Understanding Malware Delivery Methods

1. Delivering Malware via Drive-by Downloads

2. Delivering Malware via Malvertising
3. Delivering Malware via E-mail
4. Delivering Malware via USB Drives

3. Implementing Malicious Code Countermeasures

1. Antivirus Software
2. Keeping AV Signatures Up to Date
3. Spam Filters
4. Content-filtering Appliances
5. Keeping Operating Systems Up to Date
6. Scanners
7. Beware of Shortened Links
8. Sandboxing
9. Least Privilege
10. Software Security
11. Application Whitelisting and Blacklisting
12. Participating in Security Awareness and Training

4. Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures

5. Chapter Review

1. Questions
2. Answers

16. Chapter 7 Risk, Response, and Recovery

1. Defining Risk

1. Identifying Threat Sources

2. Identifying Threat Events
3. Understanding Vulnerabilities
4. Understanding Impact Assessments
5. Sharing Threat Intelligence

2. Managing Risk

1. Risk Treatment
2. Residual Risk
3. Identifying Assets
4. Risk Visibility and Reporting
5. Risk Register
6. Common Vulnerability Scoring System
7. Risk Management Frameworks

3. Performing Risk Assessments

1. Threat Modeling
2. Quantitative Analysis
3. Qualitative Analysis
4. Risk Assessment Steps
5. Address Findings

4. Supporting the Incident Lifecycle

1. Preparation
2. Detection, Analysis, and Escalation
3. Containment
4. Eradication
5. Recovery
6. Lessons Learned/Implementation of NewCountermeasure

5. Chapter Review

1. Questions
2. Answers

17. Chapter 8 Monitoring and Analysis

1. Operating and Maintaining Monitoring Systems

1. Events of Interest
 2. Intrusion Detection Systems
3. IDS Alerts
4. Network-based Intrusion Detection Systems
5. Host-based Intrusion Detection Systems
6. Intrusion Prevention Systems
7. Detection Methods
8. Wireless Intrusion Detection and PreventionSystems
9. Analyze Monitoring Results
10. Detection Systems and Logs
11. Detecting Unauthorized Changes
12. Using Security Information and EventManagement Tools
13. Continuous Monitoring
14. Document and Communicate Findings

2. Performing Security Tests and Assessments

1. Vulnerability Assessments
2. Penetration Tests

3. Chapter Review

1. Questions
2. Answers

18. Chapter 9 Controls and Countermeasures

1. Using Security Controls, Safeguards, and Countermeasures

1. Performing a Cost-Benefit Analysis

2. Security Controls Lifecycle

2. Understanding Control Goals

1. Preventive
2. Detective
3. Corrective
4. Other Controls

3. Comparing Security Control Implementation Methods

1. Administrative Security Controls
2. Technical Security Controls
3. Physical Security Controls

4. Combining Control Goals and Classes

5. Exploring Some Basic Controls

1. Hardening Systems
2. Policies, Standards, Procedures, and Guidelines
3. Response Plans
4. Change Control and Configuration Management
5. Testing and Implementing Patches, Fixes, andUpdates
6. Endpoint Device Security
7. User Awareness and Training Programs

6. Understanding Fault Tolerance

1. Fault Tolerance for Disks

2. Failover Clusters
3. Load Balancing
4. Redundant Connections

7. Understanding Backups

1. Full Backups
2. Full/Incremental Backup Strategy
3. Full/Differential Backup Strategy
4. Image-based Backups

8. Chapter Review

1. Questions
2. Answers

19. Chapter 10 Auditing and Management Processes

1. Understanding Auditing and Accountability

1. Holding Users Accountable with Audit Logs

2. Auditing with Logs
 3. Clipping Levels
4. Understanding Audit Trails

2. Exploring Audit Logs

1. Operating System Logs

2. Storing Logs on Remote Systems
3. *Nix Logs
4. Proxy Server Logs
5. Firewall Logs
6. Reviewing Logs
7. Managing Audit Logs

3. Performing Security Audits

1. Periodic Audit and Review

2. Auditing Passwords
3. Auditing Security Policies
4. ISACA
5. Exploring PCI DSS Requirements
6. Auditing Physical Access Controls

4. Understanding Configuration Management

1. Using Imaging for Configuration Management

2. Using Group Policy for Configuration Management
3. Using Other Tools for Configuration Management

5. Understanding Change Management

1. Change Management Process

2. Identifying Security Impact

6. Chapter Review

1. Questions
2. Answers

20. Chapter 11 Security Operations

 1. Handling Data

1. Classifying Data
2. Marking and Labeling Data
3. Roles and Responsibilities
4. Protecting Data from Cradle to Grave
5. Data at Rest and Data in Motion
6. Data Management Policies
7. Understanding Databases
8. Data Inference
9. Data Diddling
10. Regulatory Requirements
11. Training

2. Managing Assets Through the Lifecycle

1. Hardware Inventory
2. Software Inventory and Licenses
3. Data Storage

3. Certification and Accreditation

1. Certification, Accreditation, and SecurityAssessments

2. Common Criteria
3. Using a Risk Management Framework
4. Understanding Security Within the SystemDevelopment Lifecycle

4. Chapter Review

1. Questions
2. Answers

21. Chapter 12 Security Administration and Planning

1. Understanding Security Policies

1. Security Policy Characteristics

2. Enforcing Security Policies
3. Value of a Security Policy
 4. Security Policies Becoming More Common
5. Complying with Codes of Ethics
6. Policy Awareness
7. Updating Security Policies

2. Understanding BCP and DRP Activities

1. Business Impact Analysis

2. Disaster Recovery Plan
3. Emergency Response Plans and Procedures
4. Comparing a BCP and a DRP
5. Restoration Planning
6. Testing and Drills
7. Alternative Locations

3. Identifying Security Organizations

1. NIST
2. US-CERT
3. SANS Institute
4. CERT Division

4. Chapter Review

1. Questions
2. Answers

22. Chapter 13 Legal Issues

1. Exploring Computer Forensics

1. Supporting the Incident Lifecycle

2. Handling Evidence
3. Three Phases of a Computer ForensicsInvestigation
4. Legal and Ethical Principles

2. Comparing Computer Abuse and Computer Crime

3. Understanding Fraud and Embezzlement Crime

1. Mandatory Vacations
 2. Job Rotation

4. Understanding Privacy Issues

1. General Data Protection Regulation

2. California Supreme Court Rules That ZIP CodesAre PII
3. Connecticut’s Public Act No. 08-167
4. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act
5. California Online Privacy Protection Act of 2003

5. Legal and Regulatory Concerns

6. Chapter Review

1. Questions
2. Answers

23. Chapter 14 Cryptography

1. Understanding Basic Cryptography Concepts

1. Cryptography Terminology
2. Data Sensitivity
3. Regulatory Requirements
4. Participating in Security Awareness and Training

2. Enforcing Integrity with Hashing

1. Hashing Algorithms Provide One-Way Encryption

2. Hashing Algorithms
3. Verifying Integrity with a Hash
4. Salting Passwords

3. Exploring Symmetric Encryption

1. ROT13
2. Creating Strong Keys
3. Comparing Block and Stream Ciphers
4. Advanced Encryption Standard
5. Other Symmetric Encryption Algorithms
 4. Exploring Asymmetric Encryption

1. RSA
2. Secure Sockets Layer
3. Transport Layer Security
4. SSL Decryptors
5. Diffie-Hellman
6. Elliptic Curve Cryptography
7. Secure Shell
8. Protecting E-mail with S/MIME
9. Protecting E-mail with DKIM
10. PGP and GPG

5. Other Encryption Schemes

1. Steganography
2. IPsec

6. Understanding Public Key Infrastructure Systems

1. Certificates
2. Certificate Authority
3. Key Escrow
4. Alternative Certificate Trusts

7. Comparing Cryptanalysis Attacks

1. Fundamental Key Management Concepts

2. Known-Plaintext Attack
3. Ciphertext-Only Attack
4. Hashing and Collisions
5. Countermeasures Against Cryptanalysis Attacks

8. Chapter Review

1. Questions
2. Answers

24. Appendix About the Online Content

1. System Requirements
 2. Your Total Seminars Training Hub Account

1. Privacy Notice

3. Single User License Terms and Conditions

4. TotalTester Online
5. Technical Support

25. Glossary
26. Index

Guide
1. Cover
2. Title Page
3. SSCP Systems Security Certified Practitioner All-in-One ExamGuide

Page List
1. i
2. ii
3. iii
4. iv
5. v
6. vi
7. vii
8. viii
9. ix
10. x
11. xi
12. xii
13. xiii
14. xiv
15. xv
16. xvi
17. xvii
18. xviii
19. xix
20. xx
21. xxi
22. xxii
23. xxiii
24. xxiv
25. xxv
26. xxvi
27. 1
28. 2
29. 3
30. 4
31. 5
32. 6
33. 7
34. 8
35. 9 36. 1037. 11 38. 1239. 1340. 1441. 15 42. 1643. 17 44. 1845. 1946. 2047. 2148. 2249. 23
50. 2451. 25 52. 2653. 2754. 2855. 2956. 3057. 31 58. 3259. 3360. 34
61. 35
62. 36
63. 37
64. 38
65. 39
66. 40
67. 41
68. 42
69. 43
70. 44
71. 45
72. 46
73. 47
74. 48
75. 49
76. 50
77. 51
78. 52
79. 53
80. 54
81. 55
82. 56
83. 57
84. 58
85. 59
86. 60
87. 61
88. 62
89. 63
90. 64
91. 65
92. 66
93. 67
94. 68
95. 69
96. 70
97. 71
98. 72
99. 73
100. 74
101. 75
102. 76
103. 77
104. 78
105. 79
106. 80
107. 81
108. 82
109. 83
110. 84
111. 85
112. 86
113. 87
114. 88
115. 89
116. 90
117. 91
118. 92
119. 93
120. 94
121. 95
122. 96
123. 97
124. 98
125. 99 126. 100127. 101128. 102129. 103130. 104131. 105 132. 106133. 107134. 108135. 109
136. 110137. 111 138. 112139. 113 140. 114141. 115 142. 116 143. 117 144. 118145. 119 146. 120
147. 121
148. 122
149. 123
150. 124
151. 125
152. 126
153. 127
154. 128
155. 129
156. 130
157. 131
158. 132
159. 133
160. 134
161. 135
162. 136
163. 137
164. 138
165. 139
166. 140
167. 141
168. 142
169. 143
170. 144
171. 145
172. 146
173. 147
174. 148
175. 149
176. 150
177. 151
178. 152
179. 153
180. 154
181. 155
182. 156
183. 157
184. 158
185. 159
186. 160
187. 161
188. 162
189. 163
190. 164
191. 165
192. 166
193. 167
194. 168
195. 169
196. 170
197. 171
198. 172
199. 173
200. 174
201. 175
202. 176
203. 177
204. 178
205. 179
206. 180
207. 181
208. 182
209. 183
210. 184
211. 185
212. 186
213. 187
214. 188
215. 189
216. 190
217. 191
218. 192
219. 193
220. 194
221. 195
222. 196
223. 197
224. 198
225. 199
226. 200
227. 201
228. 202
229. 203
230. 204
231. 205
232. 206
233. 207
234. 208
235. 209
236. 210
237. 211
238. 212
239. 213
240. 214
241. 215
242. 216
243. 217
244. 218
245. 219
246. 220
247. 221
248. 222
249. 223
250. 224
251. 225
252. 226
253. 227
254. 228
255. 229
256. 230
257. 231
258. 232
259. 233
260. 234
261. 235
262. 236
263. 237
264. 238
265. 239
266. 240
267. 241
268. 242
269. 243
270. 244
271. 245
272. 246
273. 247
274. 248
275. 249
276. 250
277. 251
278. 252
279. 253
280. 254
281. 255
282. 256
283. 257
284. 258
285. 259
286. 260
287. 261
288. 262
289. 263
290. 264
291. 265
292. 266
293. 267
294. 268
295. 269
296. 270
297. 271
298. 272
299. 273
300. 274
301. 275
302. 276
303. 277
304. 278
305. 279
306. 280
307. 281
308. 282
309. 283
310. 284
311. 285
312. 286
313. 287
314. 288
315. 289
316. 290
317. 291
318. 292
319. 293
320. 294
321. 295
322. 296
323. 297
324. 298
325. 299
326. 300
327. 301
328. 302
329. 303
330. 304
331. 305
332. 306
333. 307
334. 308
335. 309
336. 310
337. 311
338. 312
339. 313
340. 314
341. 315
342. 316
343. 317
344. 318
345. 319
346. 320
347. 321
348. 322
349. 323
350. 324
351. 325
352. 326
353. 327
354. 328
355. 329
356. 330
357. 331
358. 332
359. 333
360. 334
361. 335
362. 336
363. 337
364. 338
365. 339
366. 340
367. 341
368. 342
369. 343
370. 344
371. 345
372. 346
373. 347
374. 348
375. 349
376. 350
377. 351
378. 352
379. 353
380. 354
381. 355
382. 356
383. 357
384. 358
385. 359
386. 360
387. 361
388. 362
389. 363
390. 364
391. 365
392. 366
393. 367
394. 368
395. 369
396. 370
397. 371
398. 372
399. 373
400. 374
401. 375
402. 376
403. 377
404. 378
405. 379
406. 380
407. 381
408. 382
409. 383
410. 384
411. 385
412. 386
413. 387
414. 388
415. 389
416. 390
417. 391
418. 392
419. 393
420. 394
421. 395
422. 396
423. 397
424. 398
425. 399
426. 400
427. 401
428. 402
429. 403
430. 404
431. 405
432. 406
433. 407
434. 408
435. 409
436. 410
437. 411
438. 412
439. 413
440. 414
441. 415
442. 416
443. 417
444. 418
445. 419
446. 420
447. 421
448. 422
449. 423
450. 424
451. 425
452. 426
453. 427
454. 428
455. 429
456. 430
457. 431
458. 432
459. 433
460. 434
461. 435
462. 436
463. 437
464. 438
465. 439
466. 440
467. 441
468. 442
469. 443
470. 444
471. 445
472. 446
473. 447
474. 448
475. 449
476. 450
477. 451
478. 452
479. 453
480. 454
481. 455
482. 456
483. 457
484. 458
485. 459
486. 460
487. 461
488. 462
489. 463
490. 464
491. 465
492. 466
493. 467
494. 468
495. 469
496. 470
497. 471
498. 472
499. 473
500. 474
501. 475
502. 476
503. 477
504. 478
505. 479
506. 480
507. 481
508. 482
509. 483
510. 484
511. 485
512. 486
513. 487
514. 488
515. 489
516. 490
517. 491
518. 492
519. 493
520. 494
521. 495
522. 496
523. 497
524. 498
525. 499
526. 500
527. 501
528. 502
529. 503
530. 504
531. 505
532. 506
533. 507
534. 508
535. 509
536. 510
537. 511
538. 512
539. 513
540. 514
541. 515
542. 516
543. 517
544. 518
545. 519
546. 520
547. 521
548. 522
549. 523
550. 524
551. 525
552. 526
553. 527
554. 528
555. 529
556. 530
557. 531
558. 532
559. 533
560. 534
561. 535
562. 536
563. 537
564. 538
565. 539
566. 540
567. 541
568. 542
569. 543
570. 544
571. 545
572. 546
573. 547
574. 548
575. 549
576. 550
577. 551
578. 552
579. 553
580. 554
581. 555
582. 556
583. 557
584. 558
585. 559
586. 560
587. 561
588. 562
589. 563
590. 564
591. 565
592. 566
593. 567
594. 568
595. 569
596. 570
597. 571
598. 572
599. 573
600. 574
601. 575
602. 576
603. 577
604. 578
605. 579
606. 580
607. 581
608. 582
609. 583
610. 584
611. 585
612. 586
613. 587
614. 588
615. 589
616. 590
617. 591
618. 592
619. 593
620. 594
621. 595
622. 596
623. 597
624. 598
625. 599
626. 600
627. 601
628. 602
629. 603
630. 604
631. 605
632. 606
633. 607
634. 608
635. 609
636. 610
637. 611
638. 612
639. 613
640. 614
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Darril Gibson is the CEO of YCDA, LLC (short for You Can DoAnything) and
he has authored or coauthored more than 40 books. Darril regularly writes,
consults, and teaches on a wide variety of technical and security topics and
holds several certifications, including (ISC)2 SSCP and CISSP; CompTIA
Security+ and CASP; Microsoft MCSE and MCITP; and ITIL Foundations. In
response to repeated requests, Darril created the https://gcgapremium.com/
site where he provides additional study materials for several certification
exams. He regularly posts blog articles
(https://blogs.getcertifiedgetahead.com/) about certification topics and uses
that site to help people stay abreast of changes in certification exams. You can
contact him through either of these sites. Darril lives in Virginia Beach with his
wife and two dogs. Whenever possible, they escape to a small cabin in the
country on over 20 acres of land that continues to provide them with peace,
tranquility, and balance.

ABOUT THE TECHNICAL EDITOR

Josh More has more than 18 years of experience in security,IT, development,
and system and network administration.
Currently, he runs Eyra Security, a security and business improvement
consulting firm based in Minneapolis, MN. Josh holds various security and
technical certifications and has served in a leadership position on several
security-focused groups. He writes a blog on security at www.starmind.org,
oftentaking a unique approach to solving security problems by applying lessons
from other disciplines such as agile development, lean manufacturing,
psychology, economics, and
complexity science. He has also written several books on IT,information
security, and career management.
Copyright © 2019 by McGraw-Hill Education. All rights reserved. Except as
permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this
publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or
stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission
of the publisher, with the exception that theprogram listings may be entered,
stored, and executed in a computer system, but they may not be reproduced for
publication.

ISBN: 978-1-26-012871-0
MHID: 1-26-012871-7

The material in this eBook also appears in the print version ofthis title: ISBN:
978-1-26-012870-3, MHID: 1-26-012870-9.

eBook conversion by codeMantraVersion 1.0

All trademarks are trademarks of their respective owners. Rather than put a
trademark symbol after every occurrence of a trademarked name, we use
names in an editorial fashion only, and to the benefit of the trademark owner,
with no intention of infringement of the trademark. Where such designations
appearin this book, they have been printed with initial caps.

McGraw-Hill Education eBooks are available at special quantity discounts to

use as premiums and sales promotions or for use in corporate training
programs. To contact a representative, please visit the Contact Us page at
www.mhprofessional.com.

Information has been obtained by McGraw-Hill Education fromsources

believed to be reliable. However, because of the possibility of human or
mechanical error by our sources, McGraw-Hill Education, or others, McGraw-
Hill Education does not guarantee the accuracy, adequacy, or completeness of
any information and is not responsible for any errors oromissions or the results
obtained from the use of such information.

TERMS OF USE

This is a copyrighted work and McGraw-Hill Education and itslicensors reserve

all rights in and to the work. Use of this workis subject to these terms. Except
as permitted under the Copyright Act of 1976 and the right to store and retrieve
one copy of the work, you may not decompile, disassemble, reverseengineer,
reproduce, modify, create derivative works based upon, transmit, distribute,
disseminate, sell, publish or sublicense the work or any part of it without
McGraw-Hill Education’s prior consent. You may use the work for your own
noncommercial and personal use; any other use of the work is strictly
prohibited. Your right to use the work may be terminated if you fail to comply
with these terms.

THE WORK IS PROVIDED “AS IS.” McGRAW-HILL EDUCATION AND ITS

LICENSORS MAKE NO GUARANTEESOR WARRANTIES AS TO THE
ACCURACY, ADEQUACY OR COMPLETENESS OF OR RESULTS TO BE
OBTAINED FROM USING THE WORK, INCLUDING ANY INFORMATION
THATCAN BE ACCESSED THROUGH THE WORK VIA HYPERLINKOR
OTHERWISE, AND EXPRESSLY DISCLAIM ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
PURPOSE. McGraw-Hill Education and its licensors do not warrant or
guarantee that the functions contained in the workwill meet your requirements
or that its operation will be uninterrupted or error free. Neither McGraw-Hill
Education nor its licensors shall be liable to you or anyone else for any
inaccuracy, error or omission, regardless of cause, in the workor for any
damages resulting therefrom. McGraw-Hill
Education has no responsibility for the content of any information accessed
through the work. Under no circumstances shall McGraw-Hill Education
and/or its licensorsbe liable for any indirect, incidental, special, punitive,
consequential or similar damages that result from the use of or inability to use
the work, even if any of them has been advised ofthe possibility of such
damages. This limitation of liability shall apply to any claim or cause
whatsoever whether such claim or cause arises in contract, tort or otherwise.
 To my wife Nimfa.Thanks for
sharing your life with me for the past 26 years and
letting me share mine with you.
 CONTENTS AT A GLANCE

Chapter 1 Security Fundamentals

Chapter 2 Access Controls

Chapter 3 Basic Networking and Communications Chapter 4 Advanced

Networking and CommunicationsChapter 5 Attacks

Chapter 6 Malicious Code and Activity Chapter 7 Risk, Response, and

Recovery Chapter 8 Monitoring and Analysis Chapter 9 Controls and

Countermeasures

Chapter 10 Auditing and Management Processes

Chapter 11 Security Operations

Chapter 12 Security Administration and Planning

Chapter 13 Legal Issues

Chapter 14 Cryptography Appendix About the Online Content

GlossaryIndex
 CONTENTS

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction
Exam Objective Map

Chapter 1 Security Fundamentals

Reviewing the Requirements for SSCPHave One Year of Experience Registering for
the Exam Passing the Exam
Subscribing to the (ISC)2 Code of Ethics andGetting Endorsed
Maintaining Your SSCP CertificationUnderstanding Basic Security
Concepts
Confidentiality
Integrity Availability
Exploring Fundamentals of Security
Least Privilege Separation of Duties
Privacy and Data SensitivityDefense in Depth Nonrepudiation
AAAs of SecurityAccountability Due Diligence Due Care
Chapter Review
 QuestionsAnswers

Chapter 2 Access Controls

Comparing Identification, Authentication, andAuthorization
Exploring Authentication
Three Factors of AuthenticationMultifactor Authentication
Two-Step Verification Reviewing Identification Single Sign-on Authentication
Centralized vs. Decentralized AuthenticationOffline Authentication
Device Authentication
Implementing Access Controls Comparing Subjects and ObjectsLogical Access
Controls
Comparing Access Control ModelsDiscretionary Access Control
Non-Discretionary Access Control
Access Control Matrix vs. Capability TableParticipating in the Identity
and Access Management Lifecycle
Identity Proofing
Provisioning and AuthorizationMaintenance and Entitlement De-provisioning
Participating in Physical Security OperationsBadging
Data Center AssessmentChapter Review
Questions
 Answers

Chapter 3 Basic Networking and CommunicationsUnderstanding Use Cases

Reviewing the OSI Model
The Physical Layer (Layer 1) The Data Link Layer (Layer 2)The Network Layer
(Layer 3) The Transport Layer (Layer 4)The Session Layer (Layer 5)
The Presentation Layer (Layer 6)The Application Layer (Layer 7)
Comparing the OSI and TCP/IP Models Understanding Network Topologies
andRelationships
Ethernet Bus Topology
Star TopologyTree Topology
Token Ring Topology Mesh Topology Network Relationships
Reviewing Basic Protocols and PortsComparing IPv4 and IPv6
Dynamic Host Configuration ProtocolAddress Resolution Protocol
Network Discovery Protocol
Domain Name System
Internet Control Message Protocol Internet Group Message Protocol Simple
Network Management ProtocolFile Transfer Protocol
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
a mystery as on the day when she had first surprised him, mute and
absorbed, over what the people she had always lived with would have
called “a deep book.” It was her first encounter with a born reader; or at
least, the few she had known had been, like her stepmother, the retired
opera-singer, feverish devourers of circulating library fiction: she had never
before lived in a house with books in it. Gradually she had learned to take a
pride in Hazeldean’s reading, as if it had been some rare accomplishment;
she had perceived that it reflected credit on him, and was even conscious of
its adding to the charm of his talk, a charm she had always felt without
being able to define it. But still, in her heart of hearts she regarded books as
a mere expedient, and felt sure that they were only an aid to patience, like
jackstraws or a game of patience, with the disadvantage of requiring a
greater mental effort.
“Shan’t you be too tired to read tonight?” she questioned wistfully.
“Too tired? Why, you goose, reading is the greatest rest in the world!—I
want you to go to Mrs. Struthers’s, dear; I want to see you again in that
black velvet dress,” he added with his coaxing smile.
The parlourmaid brought in the tray, and Mrs. Hazeldean busied herself
with the tea-caddy. Her husband had stretched himself out in the deep
armchair which was his habitual seat. He crossed his arms behind his neck,
leaning his head back wearily against them, so that, as she glanced at him
across the hearth, she saw the salient muscles in his long neck, and the
premature wrinkles about his ears and chin. The lower part of his face was
singularly ravaged; only the eyes, those quiet ironic grey eyes, and the
white forehead above them, reminded her of what he had been seven years
before. Only seven years!
She felt a rush of tears: no, there were times when fate was too cruel, the
future too horrible to contemplate, and the past—the past, oh, how much
worse! And there he sat, coughing, coughing—and thinking God knows
what, behind those quiet half-closed lids. At such times he grew so
mysteriously remote that she felt lonelier than when he was not in the room.
“Charlie!”
He roused himself. “Yes?”
“Here’s your tea.”
He took it from her in silence, and she began, nervously, to wonder why
he was not talking. Was it because he was afraid it might make him cough
again, afraid she would be worried, and scold him? Or was it because he
was thinking—thinking of things he had heard at old Mrs. Parrett’s, or on
the drive home with Sillerton Jackson ... hints they might have dropped ...
insinuations ... she didn’t know what ... or of something he had seen,
perhaps, from old Mrs. Parrett’s window? She looked across at his white
forehead, so smooth and impenetrable in the lamplight, and thought: “Oh,
God, it’s like a locked door. I shall dash my brains out against it some day!”
For, after all, it was not impossible that he had actually seen her, seen her
from Mrs. Parrett’s window, or even from the crowd around the door of the
hotel. For all she knew, he might have been near enough, in that crowd, to
put out his hand and touch her. And he might have held back, benumbed,
aghast, not believing his own eyes.... She couldn’t tell. She had never yet
made up her mind how he would look, how he would behave, what he
would say, if ever he did see or hear anything....
No! That was the worst of it. They had lived together for nearly nine
years—and how closely!—and nothing that she knew of him, or had
observed in him, enabled her to forecast exactly what, in that particular
case, his state of mind and his attitude would be. In his profession, she
knew, he was celebrated for his shrewdness and insight; in personal matters
he often seemed, to her alert mind, oddly absent-minded and indifferent. Yet
that might be merely his instinctive way of saving his strength for things he
considered more important. There were times when she was sure he was
quite deliberate and self-controlled enough to feel in one way and behave in
another: perhaps even to have thought out a course in advance—just as, at
the first bad symptoms of illness, he had calmly made his will, and planned
everything about her future, the house and the servants.... No, she couldn’t
tell; there always hung over her the thin glittering menace of a danger she
could neither define nor localize—like that avenging lightning which
groped for the lovers in the horrible poem he had once read aloud to her
(what a choice!) on a lazy afternoon of their wedding journey, as they lay
stretched under Italian stone-pines.
The maid came in to draw the curtains and light the lamps. The fire
glowed, the scent of the roses drifted on the warm air, and the clock ticked
out the minutes, and softly struck a half hour, while Mrs. Hazeldean
continued to ask herself, as she so often had before: “Now, what would be
the natural thing for me to say?”
 And suddenly the words escaped from her, she didn’t know how: “I
wonder you didn’t see me coming out of the hotel—for I actually squeezed
my way in.”
Her husband made no answer. Her heart jumped convulsively; then she
lifted her eyes and saw that he was asleep. How placid his face looked—
years younger than when he was awake! The immensity of her relief rushed
over her in a warm glow, the counterpart of the icy sweat which had sent
her chattering homeward from the fire. After all, if he could fall asleep, fall
into such a peaceful sleep as that—tired, no doubt, by his imprudent walk,
and the exposure to the cold—it meant, beyond all doubt, beyond all
conceivable dread, that he knew nothing, had seen nothing, suspected
nothing: that she was safe, safe, safe!
The violence of the reaction made her long to spring to her feet and
move about the room. She saw a crooked picture that she wanted to
straighten, she would have liked to give the roses another tilt in their glass.
But there he sat, quietly sleeping, and the long habit of vigilance made her
respect his rest, watching over it as patiently as if it had been a sick child’s.
She drew a contented breath. Now she could afford to think of his outing
only as it might affect his health; and she knew that this sudden drowsiness,
even if it were a sign of extreme fatigue, was also the natural restorative for
that fatigue. She continued to sit behind the tea-tray, her hands folded, her
eyes on his face, while the peace of the scene entered into her, and held her
under brooding wings.
 IV
A T Mrs. Struthers’s, at eleven o’clock that evening, the long over-lit
drawing-rooms were already thronged with people.
Lizzie Hazeldean paused on the threshold and looked about her. The
habit of pausing to get her bearings, of sending a circular glance around any
assemblage of people, any drawing-room, concert-hall or theatre that she
entered, had become so instinctive that she would have been surprised had
anyone pointed out to her the unobservant expression and careless
movements of the young women of her acquaintance, who also looked
about them, it is true, but with the vague unseeing stare of youth, and of
beauty conscious only of itself.
Lizzie Hazeldean had long since come to regard most women of her age
as children in the art of life. Some savage instinct of self-defence, fostered
by experience, had always made her more alert and perceiving than the
charming creatures who passed from the nursery to marriage as if lifted
from one rose-lined cradle into another. “Rocked to sleep—that’s what
they’ve always been,” she used to think sometimes, listening to their
innocuous talk during the long after-dinners in hot drawing-rooms, while
their husbands, in the smoking-rooms below, exchanged ideas which, if no
more striking, were at least based on more direct experiences.
But then, as all the old ladies said, Lizzie Hazeldean had always
preferred the society of men.
The man she now sought was not visible, and she gave a little sigh of
ease. “If only he has had the sense to stay away!” she thought.
She would have preferred to stay away herself; but it had been her
husband’s whim that she should come. “You know you always enjoy
yourself at Mrs. Struthers’s—everybody does. The old girl somehow
manages to have the most amusing house in New York. Who is it who’s
going to sing tonight?... If you don’t go, I shall know it’s because I’ve
coughed two or three times oftener than usual, and you’re worrying about
me. My dear girl, it will take more than the Fifth Avenue Hotel fire to kill
me.... My heart’s feeling unusually steady.... Put on your black velvet, will
you?—with these two roses....”
So she had gone. And here she was, in her black velvet, under the glitter
of Mrs. Struthers’s chandeliers, amid all the youth and good looks and
gaiety of New York; for, as Hazeldean said, Mrs. Struthers’s house was
more amusing than anybody else’s, and whenever she opened her doors the
world flocked through them.
As Mrs. Hazeldean reached the inner drawing-room the last notes of a
rich tenor were falling on the attentive silence. She saw Campanini’s low-
necked throat subside into silence above the piano, and the clapping of
many tightly-fitting gloves was succeeded by a general movement, and the
usual irrepressible outburst of talk.
In the breaking-up of groups she caught a glimpse of Sillerton Jackson’s
silvery crown. Their eyes met across bare shoulders, he bowed profoundly,
and she fancied that a dry smile lifted his moustache. “He doesn’t usually
bow to me as low as that,” she thought apprehensively.
But as she advanced into the room her self-possession returned. Among
all these stupid pretty women she had such a sense of power, of knowing
almost everything better than they did, from the way of doing her hair to the
art of keeping a secret! She felt a thrill of pride in the slope of her white
shoulders above the black velvet, in the one curl escaping from her thick
chignon, and the slant of the gold arrow tipped with diamonds which she
had thrust in to retain it. And she had done it all without a maid, with no one
cleverer than Susan to help her! Ah, as a woman she knew her business....

Mrs. Struthers, plumed and ponderous, with diamond stars studding her
black wig like a pin-cushion, had worked her resolute way back to the outer
room. More people were coming in; and with her customary rough skill she
was receiving, distributing, introducing them. Suddenly her smile deepened;
she was evidently greeting an old friend. The group about her scattered, and
Mrs. Hazeldean saw that, in her cordial absent-minded way, and while her
wandering hostess-eye swept the rooms, she was saying a confidential word
to a tall man whose hand she detained. They smiled at each other; then Mrs.
Struthers’s glance turned toward the inner room, and her smile seemed to
say: “You’ll find her there.”
 The tall man nodded. He looked about him composedly, and began to
move toward the centre of the throng, speaking to everyone, appearing to
have no object beyond that of greeting the next person in his path, yet
quietly, steadily pursuing that path, which led straight to the inner room.
Mrs. Hazeldean had found a seat near the piano. A good-looking youth,
seated beside her, was telling her at considerable length what he was going
to wear at the Beauforts’ fancy-ball. She listened, approved, suggested; but
her glance never left the advancing figure of the tall man.
Handsome? Yes, she said to herself; she had to admit that he was
handsome. A trifle too broad and florid, perhaps; though his air and his
attitude so plainly denied it that, on second thoughts, one agreed that a man
of his height had, after all, to carry some ballast. Yes; his assurance made
him, as a rule, appear to people exactly as he chose to appear; that is, as a
man over forty, but carrying his years carelessly, an active muscular man,
whose blue eyes were still clear, whose fair hair waved ever so little less
thickly than it used to on a low sunburnt forehead, over eyebrows almost
silvery in their blondness, and blue eyes the bluer for their thatch. Stupid-
looking? By no means. His smile denied that. Just self-sufficient enough to
escape fatuity, yet so cool that one felt the fundamental coldness, he steered
his way through life as easily and resolutely as he was now working his
way through Mrs. Struthers’s drawing-rooms.
Half-way, he was detained by a tap of Mrs. Wesson’s red fan. Mrs.
Wesson—surely, Mrs. Hazeldean reflected, Charles had spoken of Mrs.
Sabina Wesson’s being with her mother, old Mrs. Parrett, while they
watched the fire? Sabina Wesson was a redoubtable woman, one of the few
of her generation and her clan who had broken with tradition, and gone to
Mrs. Struthers’s almost as soon as the Shoe-Polish Queen had bought her
house in Fifth Avenue, and issued her first challenge to society. Lizzie
Hazeldean shut her eyes for an instant; then, rising from her seat, she joined
the group about the singer. From there she wandered on to another knot of
acquaintances.
“Look here: the fellow’s going to sing again. Let’s get into that corner
over there.”
She felt ever so slight a touch on her arm, and met Henry Prest’s
composed glance.
 A red-lit and palm-shaded recess divided the drawing-rooms from the
dining-room, which ran across the width of the house at the back. Mrs.
Hazeldean hesitated; then she caught Mrs. Wesson’s watchful glance, lifted
her head with a smile and followed her companion.
They sat down on a small sofa under the palms, and a couple, who had
been in search of the same retreat, paused on the threshold, and with an
interchange of glances passed on. Mrs. Hazeldean smiled more vividly.
“Where are my roses? Didn’t you get them?” Prest asked. He had a way
of looking her over from beneath lowered lids, while he affected to be
examining a glove-button or contemplating the tip of his shining boot.
“Yes, I got them,” she answered.
“You’re not wearing them. I didn’t order those.”
“No.”
“Whose are they, then?”
She unfolded her mother-of-pearl fan, and bent above its complicated
traceries.
“Mine,” she pronounced.
“Yours? Well, obviously. But I suppose someone sent them to you?”
“I did.” She hesitated a second. “I sent them to myself.”
He raised his eyebrows a little. “Well, they don’t suit you—that washy
pink! May I ask why you didn’t wear mine?”
“I’ve already told you.... I’ve often asked you never to send flowers ...
on the day....”
“Nonsense. That’s the very day.... What’s the matter? Are you still
nervous?”
She was silent for a moment; then she lowered her voice to say: “You
ought not to have come here tonight.”
“My dear girl, how unlike you! You are nervous.”
“Didn’t you see all those people in the Parretts’ window?”
“What, opposite? Lord, no; I just took to my heels! It was the deuce, the
back way being barred. But what of it? In all that crowd, do you suppose for
a moment—”
“My husband was in the window with them,” she said, still lower.
 His confident face fell for a moment, and then almost at once regained
its look of easy arrogance.
“Well—?”
“Oh, nothing—as yet. Only I ask you ... to go away now.”
“Just as you asked me not to come! Yet you came, because you had the
sense to see that if you didn’t ... and I came for the same reason. Look here,
my dear, for God’s sake don’t lose your head!”
The challenge seemed to rouse her. She lifted her chin, glanced about the
thronged room which they commanded from their corner, and nodded and
smiled invitingly at several acquaintances, with the hope that some one of
them might come up to her. But though they all returned her greetings with
a somewhat elaborate cordiality, not one advanced toward her secluded seat.
She turned her head slightly toward her companion. “I ask you again to
go,” she repeated.
“Well, I will then, after the fellow’s sung. But I’m bound to say you’re a
good deal pleasanter—”
The first bars of “Salve, Dimora” silenced him, and they sat side by side
in the meditative rigidity of fashionable persons listening to expensive
music. She had thrown herself into a corner of the sofa, and Henry Prest,
about whom everything was discreet but his eyes, sat apart from her, one
leg crossed over the other, one hand holding his folded opera-hat on his
knee, while the other hand rested beside him on the sofa. But an end of her
tulle scarf lay in the space between them; and without looking in his
direction, without turning her glance from the singer, she was conscious
that Prest’s hand had reached and drawn the scarf toward him. She shivered
a little, made an involuntary motion as though to gather it about her—and
then desisted. As the song ended, he bent toward her slightly, said:
“Darling” so low that it seemed no more than a breath on her cheek, and
then, rising, bowed, and strolled into the other room.
She sighed faintly, and, settling herself once more in her corner, lifted
her brilliant eyes to Sillerton Jackson, who was approaching. “It was good
of you to bring Charlie home from the Parretts’ this afternoon.” She held
out her hand, making way for him at her side.
“Good of me?” he laughed. “Why, I was glad of the chance of getting
him safely home; it was rather naughty of him to be where he was, I
suspect.” She fancied a slight pause, as if he waited to see the effect of this,
and her lashes beat her cheeks. But already he was going on: “Do you
encourage him, with that cough, to run about town after fire-engines?”
She gave back the laugh.
“I don’t discourage him—ever—if I can help it. But it was foolish of him
to go out today,” she agreed; and all the while she kept on asking herself, as
she had that afternoon, in her talk with her husband: “Now, what would be
the natural thing for me to say?”
Should she speak of having been at the fire herself—or should she not?
The question dinned in her brain so loudly that she could hardly hear what
her companion was saying; yet she had, at the same time, a queer feeling of
his never having been so close to her, or rather so closely intent on her, as
now. In her strange state of nervous lucidity, her eyes seemed to absorb with
a new precision every facial detail of whoever approached her; and old
Sillerton Jackson’s narrow mask, his withered pink cheeks, the veins in the
hollow of his temples, under the carefully-tended silvery hair, and the tiny
blood-specks in the white of his eyes as he turned their cautious blue gaze
on her, appeared as if presented under some powerful lens. With his
eyeglasses dangling over one white-gloved hand, the other supporting his
opera-hat on his knee, he suggested, behind that assumed carelessness of
pose, the patient fixity of a naturalist holding his breath near the crack from
which some tiny animal might suddenly issue—if one watched long
enough, or gave it, completely enough, the impression of not looking for it,
or dreaming it was anywhere near. The sense of that tireless attention made
Mrs. Hazeldean’s temples ache as if she sat under a glare of light even
brighter than that of the Struthers’ chandeliers—a glare in which each
quiver of a half-formed thought might be as visible behind her forehead as
the faint lines wrinkling its surface into an uncontrollable frown of anxiety.
Yes, Prest was right; she was losing her head—losing it for the first time in
the dangerous year during which she had had such continual need to keep it
steady.
“What is it? What has happened to me?” she wondered.
There had been alarms before—how could it be otherwise? But they had
only stimulated her, made her more alert and prompt; whereas tonight she
felt herself quivering away into she knew not what abyss of weakness.
What was different, then? Oh, she knew well enough! It was Charles ... that
haggard look in his eyes, and the lines of his throat as he had leaned back
sleeping. She had never before admitted to herself how ill she thought him;
and now, to have to admit it, and at the same time not to have the complete
certainty that the look in his eyes was caused by illness only, made the
strain unbearable.
She glanced about her with a sudden sense of despair. Of all the people
in those brilliant animated groups—of all the women who called her Lizzie,
and the men who were familiars at her house—she knew that not one, at
that moment, guessed, or could have understood, what she was feeling....
Her eyes fell on Henry Prest, who had come to the surface a little way off,
bending over the chair of the handsome Mrs. Lyman. “And you least of all!”
she thought. “Yet God knows,” she added with a shiver, “they all have their
theories about me!”
“My dear Mrs. Hazeldean, you look a little pale. Are you cold? Shall I
get you some champagne?” Sillerton Jackson was officiously suggesting.
“If you think the other women look blooming! My dear man, it’s this
hideous vulgar overhead lighting....” She rose impatiently. It had occurred
to her that the thing to do—the “natural” thing—would be to stroll up to
Jinny Lyman, over whom Prest was still attentively bending. Then people
would see if she was nervous, or ill—or afraid!
But half-way she stopped and thought: “Suppose the Parretts and
Wessons did see me? Then my joining Jinny while he’s talking to her will
look—how will it look?” She began to regret not having had it out on the
spot with Sillerton Jackson, who could be trusted to hold his tongue on
occasion, especially if a pretty woman threw herself on his mercy. She
glanced over her shoulder as if to call him back; but he had turned away,
been absorbed into another group, and she found herself, instead, abruptly
face to face with Sabina Wesson. Well, perhaps that was better still. After
all, it all depended on how much Mrs. Wesson had seen, and what line she
meant to take, supposing she had seen anything. She was not likely to be as
inscrutable as old Sillerton. Lizzie wished now that she had not forgotten to
go to Mrs. Wesson’s last party.
“Dear Mrs. Wesson, it was so kind of you—”
But Mrs. Wesson was not there. By the exercise of that mysterious
protective power which enables a woman desirous of not being waylaid to
make herself invisible, or to transport herself, by means imperceptible, to
another part of the earth’s surface, Mrs. Wesson, who, two seconds earlier,
appeared in all her hard handsomeness to be bearing straight down on Mrs.
Hazeldean, with a scant yard of clear parquet between them—Mrs. Wesson,
as her animated back and her active red fan now called on all the company
to notice, had never been there at all, had never seen Mrs. Hazeldean (“Was
she at Mrs. Struthers’s last Sunday? How odd! I must have left before she
got there—“), but was busily engaged, on the farther side of the piano, in
examining a picture to which her attention appeared to have been called by
the persons nearest her.
“Ah, how life-like! That’s what I always feel when I see a Meissonier,”
she was heard to exclaim, with her well-known instinct for the fitting
epithet.
Lizzie Hazeldean stood motionless. Her eyes dazzled as if she had
received a blow on the forehead. “So that’s what it feels like!” she thought.
She lifted her head very high, looked about her again, tried to signal to
Henry Prest, but saw him still engaged with the lovely Mrs. Lyman, and at
the same moment caught the glance of young Hubert Wesson, Sabina’s
eldest, who was standing in disengaged expectancy near the supper-room
door.
Hubert Wesson, as his eyes met Mrs. Hazeldean’s, crimsoned to the
forehead, hung back a moment, and then came forward, bowing low—again
that too low bow! “So he saw me too,” she thought. She put her hand on his
arm with a laugh. “Dear me, how ceremonious you are! Really, I’m not as
old as that bow of yours implies. My dear boy, I hope you want to take me
in to supper at once. I was out in the cold all the afternoon, gazing at the
Fifth Avenue Hotel fire, and I’m simply dying of hunger and fatigue.”
There, the die was cast—she had said it loud enough for all the people
nearest her to hear! And she was sure now that it was the right, the “natural”
thing to do.
Her spirits rose, and she sailed into the supper-room like a goddess,
steering Hubert to an unoccupied table in a flowery corner.
“No—I think we’re very well by ourselves, don’t you? Do you want that
fat old bore of a Lucy Vanderlow to join us? If you do, of course ... I can see
she’s dying to ... but then, I warn you, I shall ask a young man! Let me see
—shall I ask Henry Prest? You see he’s hovering! No, it is jollier with just
you and me, isn’t it?” She leaned forward a little, resting her chin on her
clasped hands, her elbows on the table, in an attitude which the older
women thought shockingly free, but the younger ones were beginning to
imitate.
“And now, some champagne, please—and hot terrapin!... But I suppose
you were at the fire yourself, weren’t you?” she leaned still a little nearer to
say.
The blush again swept over young Wesson’s face, rose to his forehead,
and turned the lobes of his large ears to balls of fire (“It looks,” she thought,
“as if he had on huge coral earrings.”). But she forced him to look at her,
laughed straight into his eyes, and went on: “Did you ever see a funnier
sight than all those dressed-up absurdities rushing out into the cold? It
looked like the end of an Inauguration Ball! I was so fascinated that I
actually pushed my way into the hall. The firemen were furious, but they
couldn’t stop me—nobody can stop me at a fire! You should have seen the
ladies scuttling downstairs—the fat ones! Oh, but I beg your pardon; I’d
forgotten that you admire ... avoirdupois. No? But ... Mrs. Van ... so stupid
of me! Why, you’re actually blushing! I assure you, you’re as red as your
mother’s fan—and visible from as great a distance! Yes, please; a little more
champagne....”
And then the inevitable began. She forgot the fire, forgot her anxieties,
forgot Mrs. Wesson’s affront, forgot everything but the amusement, the
passing childish amusement, of twirling around her little finger this shy
clumsy boy, as she had twirled so many others, old and young, not caring
afterward if she ever saw them again, but so absorbed in the sport, and in
her sense of knowing how to do it better than the other women—more
quietly, more insidiously, without ogling, bridling or grimacing—that
sometimes she used to ask herself with a shiver: “What was the gift given to
me for?” Yes; it always amused her at first: the gradual dawn of attraction in
eyes that had regarded her with indifference, the blood rising to the face, the
way she could turn and twist the talk as though she had her victim on a
leash, spinning him after her down winding paths of sentimentality, irony,
caprice ... and leaving him, with beating heart and dazzled eyes, to visions
of an all-promising morrow.... “My only accomplishment!” she murmured
to herself as she rose from the table followed by young Wesson’s fascinated
gaze, while already, on her own lips, she felt the taste of cinders.
“But at any rate,” she thought, “he’ll hold his tongue about having seen
me at the fire.”
 V
S HE let herself in with her latch-key, glanced at the notes and letters on
the hall-table (the old habit of allowing nothing to escape her), and stole
up through the darkness to her room.
A fire still glowed in the chimney, and its light fell on two vases of
crimson roses. The room was full of their scent.
Mrs. Hazeldean frowned, and then shrugged her shoulders. It had been a
mistake, after all, to let it appear that she was indifferent to the flowers; she
must remember to thank Susan for rescuing them. She began to undress,
hastily yet clumsily, as if her deft fingers were all thumbs; but first,
detaching the two faded pink roses from her bosom, she put them with a
reverent touch into a glass on the toilet-table. Then, slipping on her
dressing-gown, she stole to her husband’s door. It was shut, and she leaned
her ear to the keyhole. After a moment she caught his breathing, heavy, as it
always was when he had a cold, but regular, untroubled.... With a sigh of
relief she tiptoed back. Her uncovered bed, with its fresh pillows and satin
coverlet, sent her a rosy invitation; but she cowered down by the fire,
hugging her knees and staring into the coals.
“So that’s what it feels like!” she repeated.
It was the first time in her life that she had ever been deliberately “cut”;
and the cut was a deadly injury in old New York. For Sabina Wesson to
have used it, consciously, deliberately—for there was no doubt that she had
purposely advanced toward her victim—she must have done so with intent
to kill. And to risk that, she must have been sure of her facts, sure of
corroborating witnesses, sure of being backed up by all her clan.
Lizzie Hazeldean had her clan too—but it was a small and weak one,
and she hung on its outer fringe by a thread of little-regarded cousinship. As
for the Hazeldean tribe, which was larger and stronger (though nothing like
the great organized Wesson-Parrett gens, with half New York and all Albany
at its back)—well, the Hazeldeans were not much to be counted on, and
would even, perhaps, in a furtive negative way, be not too sorry (“if it were
not for poor Charlie”) that poor Charlie’s wife should at last be made to pay
for her good looks, her popularity, above all for being, in spite of her origin,
treated by poor Charlie as if she were one of them!
Her origin was, of course, respectable enough. Everybody knew all
about the Winters—she had been Lizzie Winter. But the Winters were very
small people, and her father, the Reverend Arcadius Winter, the sentimental
over-popular Rector of a fashionable New York church, after a few seasons
of too great success as preacher and director of female consciences, had
suddenly had to resign and go to Bermuda for his health—or was it France?
—to some obscure watering-place, it was rumoured. At any rate, Lizzie,
who went with him (with a crushed bed-ridden mother), was ultimately,
after the mother’s death, fished out of a girls’ school in Brussels—they
seemed to have been in so many countries at once!—and brought back to
New York by a former parishioner of poor Arcadius’s, who had always
“believed in him,” in spite of the Bishop, and who took pity on his lonely
daughter.
The parishioner, Mrs. Mant, was “one of the Hazeldeans.” She was a
rich widow, given to generous gestures which she was often at a loss how to
complete; and when she had brought Lizzie Winter home, and sufficiently
celebrated her own courage in doing so, she did not quite know what step to
take next. She had fancied it would be pleasant to have a clever handsome
girl about the house; but her housekeeper was not of the same mind. The
spare-room sheets had not been out of lavender for twenty years—and Miss
Winter always left the blinds up in her room, and the carpet and curtains,
unused to such exposure, suffered accordingly. Then young men began to
call—they called in numbers. Mrs. Mant had not supposed that the daughter
of a clergyman—and a clergyman “under a cloud”—would expect visitors.
She had imagined herself taking Lizzie Winter to Church Fairs, and having
the stitches of her knitting picked up by the young girl, whose “eyes were
better” than her benefactress’s. But Lizzie did not know how to knit—she
possessed no useful accomplishments—and she was visibly bored by
Church Fairs, where her presence was of little use, since she had no money
to spend. Mrs. Mant began to see her mistake; and the discovery made her
dislike her protégée, whom she secretly regarded as having intentionally
misled her.
In Mrs. Mant’s life, the transition from one enthusiasm to another was
always marked by an interval of disillusionment, during which, Providence
having failed to fulfill her requirements, its existence was openly called into
question. But in this flux of moods there was one fixed point: Mrs. Mant
was a woman whose life revolved about a bunch of keys. What treasures
they gave access to, what disasters would have ensued had they been
forever lost, was not quite clear; but whenever they were missed the
household was in an uproar, and as Mrs. Mant would trust them to no one
but herself, these occasions were frequent. One of them arose at the very
moment when Mrs. Mant was recovering from her enthusiasm for Miss
Winter. A minute before, the keys had been there, in a pocket of her work-
table; she had actually touched them in hunting for her buttonhole-scissors.
She had been called away to speak to the plumber about the bath-room leak,
and when she left the room there was no one in it but Miss Winter. When
she returned, the keys were gone. The house had been turned inside out;
everyone had been, if not accused, at least suspected; and in a rash moment
Mrs. Mant had spoken of the police. The housemaid had thereupon given
warning, and her own maid threatened to follow; when suddenly the
Bishop’s hints recurred to Mrs. Mant. The Bishop had always implied that
there had been something irregular in Dr. Winter’s accounts, besides the
other unfortunate business....
Very mildly, she had asked Miss Winter if she might not have seen the
keys, and “picked them up without thinking.” Miss Winter permitted herself
to smile in denying the suggestion; the smile irritated Mrs. Mant; and in a
moment the floodgates were opened. She saw nothing to smile at in her
question—unless it was of a kind that Miss Winter was already used to,
prepared for ... with that sort of background ... her unfortunate father....
“Stop!” Lizzie Winter cried. She remembered now, as if it had happened
yesterday, the abyss suddenly opening at her feet. It was her first direct
contact with human cruelty. Suffering, weakness, frailties other than Mrs.
Mant’s restricted fancy could have pictured, the girl had known, or at least
suspected; but she had found as much kindness as folly in her path, and no
one had ever before attempted to visit upon her the dimly-guessed
shortcomings of her poor old father. She shook with horror as much as with
indignation, and her “Stop!” blazed out so violently that Mrs. Mant, turning
white, feebly groped for the bell.
And it was then, at that very moment, that Charles Hazeldean came in—
Charles Hazeldean, the favourite nephew, the pride of the tribe. Lizzie had
seen him only once or twice, for he had been absent since her return to New
York. She had thought him distinguished-looking, but rather serious and
sarcastic; and he had apparently taken little notice of her—which perhaps
accounted for her opinion.
“Oh, Charles, dearest Charles—that you should be here to hear such
things said to me!” his aunt gasped, her hand on her outraged heart.
“What things? Said by whom? I see no one here to say them but Miss
Winter,” Charles had laughed, taking the girl’s icy hand.
“Don’t shake hands with her! She has insulted me! She has ordered me
to keep silence—in my own house. ‘Stop!’ she said, when I was trying, in
the kindness of my heart, to get her to admit privately.... Well, if she prefers
to have the police....”
“I do! I ask you to send for them!” Lizzie cried.
How vividly she remembered all that followed: the finding of the keys,
Mrs. Mant’s reluctant apologies, her own cold acceptance of them, and the
sense on both sides of the impossibility of continuing their life together!
She had been wounded to the soul, and her own plight first revealed to her
in all its destitution. Before that, despite the ups and downs of a wandering
life, her youth, her good looks, the sense of a certain bright power over
people and events, had hurried her along on a spring tide of confidence; she
had never thought of herself as the dependent, the beneficiary, of the
persons who were kind to her. Now she saw herself, at twenty, a penniless
girl, with a feeble discredited father carrying his snowy head, his unctuous
voice, his edifying manner from one cheap watering-place to another,
through an endless succession of sentimental and pecuniary entanglements.
To him she could be of no more help than he to her; and save for him she
was alone. The Winter cousins, as much humiliated by his disgrace as they
had been puffed-up by his triumphs, let it be understood, when the breach
with Mrs. Mant became known, that they were not in a position to interfere;
and among Dr. Winter’s former parishioners none was left to champion
him. Almost at the same time, Lizzie heard that he was about to marry a
Portuguese opera-singer and be received into the Church of Rome; and this
crowning scandal too promptly justified his family.
The situation was a grave one, and called for energetic measures. Lizzie
understood it—and a week later she was engaged to Charles Hazeldean.
She always said afterward that but for the keys he would never have
thought of marrying her; while he laughingly affirmed that, on the contrary,
but for the keys she would never have looked at him.
 But what did it all matter, in the complete and blessed understanding
which was to follow on their hasty union? If all the advantages on both
sides had been weighed and found equal by judicious advisers, harmony
more complete could hardly have been predicted. As a matter of fact, the
advisers, had they been judicious, would probably have found only
elements of discord in the characters concerned. Charles Hazeldean was by
nature an observer and a student, brooding and curious of mind: Lizzie
Winter (as she looked back at herself)—what was she, what would she ever
be, but a quick, ephemeral creature, in whom a perpetual and adaptable
activity simulated mind, as her grace, her swiftness, her expressiveness
simulated beauty? So others would have judged her; so, now, she judged
herself. And she knew that in fundamental things she was still the same.
And yet she had satisfied him: satisfied him, to all appearances, as
completely in the quiet later years as in the first flushed hours. As
completely, or perhaps even more so. In the early months, dazzled gratitude
made her the humbler, fonder worshipper; but as her powers expanded in
the warm air of comprehension, as she felt herself grow handsomer,
cleverer, more competent and more companionable than he had hoped, or
she had dreamed herself capable of becoming, the balance was
imperceptibly reversed, and the triumph in his eyes when they rested on her.
The Hazeldeans were conquered; they had to admit it. Such a brilliant
recruit to the clan was not to be disowned. Mrs. Mant was left to nurse her
grievance in solitude, till she too fell into line, carelessly but handsomely
forgiven.
Ah, those first years of triumph! They frightened Lizzie now as she
looked back. One day, the friendless defenceless daughter of a discredited
man; the next, almost, the wife of Charlie Hazeldean, the popular successful
young lawyer, with a good practice already assured, and the best of
professional and private prospects. His own parents were dead, and had
died poor; but two or three childless relatives were understood to be letting
their capital accumulate for his benefit, and meanwhile in Lizzie’s thrifty
hands his earnings were largely sufficient.
Ah, those first years! There had been barely six; but even now there were
moments when their sweetness drenched her to the soul.... Barely six; and
then the sharp re-awakening of an inherited weakness of the heart that
Hazeldean and his doctors had imagined to be completely cured. Once
before, for the same cause, he had been sent off, suddenly, for a year of
travel in mild climates and distant scenes; and his first return had coincided
with the close of Lizzie’s sojourn at Mrs. Mant’s. The young man felt sure
enough of the future to marry and take up his professional duties again, and
for the following six years he had led, without interruption, the busy life of
a successful lawyer; then had come a second breakdown, more
unexpectedly, and with more alarming symptoms. The “Hazeldean heart”
was a proverbial boast in the family; the Hazeldeans privately considered it
more distinguished than the Sillerton gout, and far more refined than the
Wesson liver; and it had permitted most of them to survive, in
valetudinarian ease, to a ripe old age, when they died of some quite other
disorder. But Charles Hazeldean had defied it, and it took its revenge, and
took it savagely.
One by one, hopes and plans faded. The Hazeldeans went south for a
winter; he lay on a deck-chair in a Florida garden, and read and dreamed,
and was happy with Lizzie beside him. So the months passed; and by the
following autumn he was better, returned to New York, and took up his
profession. Intermittently but obstinately, he had continued the struggle for
two more years; but before they were over husband and wife understood
that the good days were done.
He could be at his office only at lengthening intervals; he sank gradually
into invalidism without submitting to it. His income dwindled; and,
indifferent for himself, he fretted ceaselessly at the thought of depriving
Lizzie of the least of her luxuries.
At heart she was indifferent to them too; but she could not convince him
of it. He had been brought up in the old New York tradition, which decreed
that a man, at whatever cost, must provide his wife with what she had
always “been accustomed to”; and he had gloried too much in her
prettiness, her elegance, her easy way of wearing her expensive dresses, and
his friends’ enjoyment of the good dinners she knew how to order, not to
accustom her to everything which could enhance such graces. Mrs. Mant’s
secret satisfaction rankled in him. She sent him Baltimore terrapin, and her
famous clam broth, and a dozen of the old Hazeldean port, and said “I told
you so” to her confidants when Lizzie was mentioned; and Charles
Hazeldean knew it, and swore at it.
“I won’t be pauperized by her!” he declared; but Lizzie smiled away his
anger, and persuaded him to taste the terrapin and sip the port.
 She was smiling faintly at the memory of the last passage between him
and Mrs. Mant when the turning of the bedroom door-handle startled her.
She jumped up, and he stood there. The blood rushed to her forehead; his
expression frightened her; for an instant she stared at him as if he had been
an enemy. Then she saw that the look in his face was only the remote lost
look of excessive physical pain.
She was at his side at once, supporting him, guiding him to the nearest
armchair. He sank into it, and she flung a shawl over him, and knelt at his
side while his inscrutable eyes continued to repel her.
“Charles ... Charles,” she pleaded.
For a while he could not speak; and she said to herself that she would
perhaps never know whether he had sought her because he was ill, or
whether illness had seized him as he entered her room to question, accuse,
or reveal what he had seen or heard that afternoon.
Suddenly he lifted his hand and pressed back her forehead, so that her
face lay bare under his eyes.
“Love, love—you’ve been happy?”
“Happy?” The word choked her. She clung to him, burying her anguish
against his knees. His hand stirred weakly in her hair, and gathering her
whole strength into the gesture, she raised her head again, looked into his
eyes, and breathed back: “And you?”
He gave her one full look; all their life together was in it, from the first
day to the last. His hand brushed her once more, like a blessing, and then
dropped. The moment of their communion was over; the next she was
preparing remedies, ringing for the servants, ordering the doctor to be
called. Her husband was once more the harmless helpless captive that
sickness makes of the most dreaded and the most loved.
 VI
I T was in Mrs. Mant’s drawing-room that, some half-year later, Mrs.
Charles Hazeldean, after a moment’s hesitation, said to the servant that,
yes, he might show in Mr. Prest.
Mrs. Mant was away. She had been leaving for Washington to visit a
new protégée when Mrs. Hazeldean arrived from Europe, and after a rapid
consultation with the clan had decided that it would not be “decent” to let
poor Charles’s widow go to an hotel. Lizzie had therefore the strange
sensation of returning, after nearly nine years, to the house from which her
husband had triumphantly rescued her; of returning there, to be sure, in
comparative independence, and without danger of falling into her former
bondage, yet with every nerve shrinking from all that the scene revived.
Mrs. Mant, the next day, had left for Washington; but before starting she
had tossed a note across the breakfast-table to her visitor.
“Very proper—he was one of Charlie’s oldest friends, I believe?” she
said, with her mild frosty smile. Mrs. Hazeldean glanced at the note, turned
it over as if to examine the signature, and restored it to her hostess.
“Yes. But I don’t think I care to see anyone just yet.”
There was a pause, during which the butler brought in fresh griddle-
cakes, replenished the hot milk, and withdrew. As the door closed on him,
Mrs. Mant said, with a dangerous cordiality: “No one would misunderstand
your receiving an old friend of your husband’s ... like Mr. Prest.”
Lizzie Hazeldean cast a sharp glance at the large empty mysterious face
across the table. They wanted her to receive Henry Prest, then? Ah, well ...
perhaps she understood....
“Shall I answer this for you, my dear? Or will you?” Mrs. Mant pursued.
“Oh, as you like. But don’t fix a day, please. Later—”
Mrs. Mant’s face again became vacuous. She murmured: “You must not
shut yourself up too much. It will not do to be morbid. I’m sorry to have to
leave you here alone—”
Lizzie’s eyes filled: Mrs. Mant’s sympathy seemed more cruel than her
cruelty. Every word that she used had a veiled taunt for its counterpart.
 “Oh, you mustn’t think of giving up your visit—”
“My dear, how can I? It’s a duty. I’ll send a line to Henry Prest, then.... If
you would sip a little port at luncheon and dinner we should have you
looking less like a ghost....”

Mrs. Mant departed; and two days later—the interval was “decent”—Mr.
Henry Prest was announced. Mrs. Hazeldean had not seen him since the
previous New Year’s day. Their last words had been exchanged in Mrs.
Struthers’s crimson boudoir, and since then half a year had elapsed. Charles
Hazeldean had lingered for a fortnight; but though there had been ups and
downs, and intervals of hope when none could have criticised his wife for
seeing her friends, her door had been barred against everyone. She had not
excluded Henry Prest more rigorously than the others; he had simply been
one of the many who received, day by day, the same answer: “Mrs.
Hazeldean sees no one but the family.”
Almost immediately after her husband’s death she had sailed for Europe
on a long-deferred visit to her father, who was now settled at Nice; but from
this expedition she had presumably brought back little comfort, for when
she arrived in New York her relations were struck by her air of ill-health
and depression. It spoke in her favour, however; they were agreed that she
was behaving with propriety.
She looked at Henry Prest as if he were a stranger: so difficult was it, at
the first moment, to fit his robust and splendid person into the region of
twilight shades which, for the last months, she had inhabited. She was
beginning to find that everyone had an air of remoteness; she seemed to see
people and life through the confusing blur of the long crape veil in which it
was a widow’s duty to shroud her affliction. But she gave him her hand
without perceptible reluctance.
He lifted it toward his lips, in an obvious attempt to combine gallantry
with condolence, and then, half-way up, seemed to feel that the occasion
required him to release it.
“Well—you’ll admit that I’ve been patient!” he exclaimed.
“Patient? Yes. What else was there to be?” she rejoined with a faint
smile, as he seated himself beside her, a little too near.
“Oh, well ... of course! I understood all that, I hope you’ll believe. But
mightn’t you at least have answered my letters—one or two of them?”
 She shook her head. “I couldn’t write.”
“Not to anyone? Or not to me?” he queried, with ironic emphasis.
“I wrote only the letters I had to—no others.”
“Ah, I see.” He laughed slightly. “And you didn’t consider that letters to
me were among them?”
She was silent, and he stood up and took a turn across the room. His face
was redder than usual, and now and then a twitch passed over it. She saw
that he felt the barrier of her crape, and that it left him baffled and resentful.
A struggle was still perceptibly going on in him between his traditional
standard of behaviour at such a meeting, and primitive impulses renewed by
the memory of their last hours together. When he turned back and paused
before her his ruddy flush had paled, and he stood there, frowning,
uncertain, and visibly resenting the fact that she made him so.
“You sit there like a stone!” he said.
“I feel like a stone.”
“Oh, come—!”
She knew well enough what he was thinking: that the only way to bridge
over such a bad beginning was to get the woman into your arms—and talk
afterward. It was the classic move. He had done it dozens of times, no
doubt, and was evidently asking himself why the deuce he couldn’t do it
now.... But something in her look must have benumbed him. He sat down
again beside her.
“What you must have been through, dearest!” He waited and coughed. “I
can understand your being—all broken up. But I know nothing; remember,
I know nothing as to what actually happened....”
“Nothing happened.”
“As to—what we feared? No hint—?”
She shook her head.
He cleared his throat before the next question. “And you don’t think that
in your absence he may have spoken—to anyone?”
“Never!”
“Then, my dear, we seem to have had the most unbelievable good luck;
and I can’t see—”
 He had edged slowly nearer, and now laid a large ringed hand on her
sleeve. How well she knew those rings—the two dull gold snakes with
malevolent jewelled eyes! She sat as motionless as if their coils were about
her, till slowly his tentative grasp relaxed.
“Lizzie, you know”—his tone was discouraged—“this is morbid....”
“Morbid?”
“When you’re safe out of the worst scrape ... and free, my darling, free!
Don’t you realize it? I suppose the strain’s been too much for you; but I
want you to feel that now—”
She stood up suddenly, and put half the length of the room between
them.
“Stop! Stop! Stop!” she almost screamed, as she had screamed long ago
at Mrs. Mant.
He stood up also, darkly red under his rich sunburn, and forced a smile.
“Really,” he protested, “all things considered—and after a separation of
six months!” She was silent. “My dear,” he continued mildly, “will you tell
me what you expect me to think?”
“Oh, don’t take that tone,” she murmured.
“What tone?”
“As if—as if—you still imagined we could go back—”
She saw his face fall. Had he ever before, she wondered, stumbled upon
an obstacle in that smooth walk of his? It flashed over her that this was the
danger besetting men who had a “way with women”—the day came when
they might follow it too blindly.
The reflection evidently occurred to him almost as soon as it did to her.
He summoned another propitiatory smile, and drawing near, took her hand
gently. “But I don’t want to go back.... I want to go forward, dearest.... Now
that at last you’re free.”
She seized on the word as if she had been waiting for her cue. “Free! Oh,
that’s it—free! Can’t you see, can’t you understand, that I mean to stay
free?”
Again a shadow of distrust crossed his face, and the smile he had begun
for her reassurance seemed to remain on his lips for his own.
 “But of course! Can you imagine that I want to put you in chains? I want
you to be as free as you please—free to love me as much as you choose!”
He was visibly pleased with the last phrase.
She drew away her hand, but not unkindly. “I’m sorry—I am sorry,
Henry. But you don’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand?”
“That what you ask is quite impossible—ever. I can’t go on ... in the old
way....”
She saw his face working nervously. “In the old way? You mean—?”
Before she could explain he hurried on with an increasing majesty of
manner: “Don’t answer! I see—I understand. When you spoke of freedom
just now I was misled for a moment—I frankly own I was—into thinking
that, after your wretched marriage, you might prefer discreeter ties ... an
apparent independence which would leave us both.... I say apparent, for on
my side there has never been the least wish to conceal.... But if I was
mistaken, if on the contrary what you wish is ... is to take advantage of your
freedom to regularize our ... our attachment....”
She said nothing, not because she had any desire to have him complete
the phrase, but because she found nothing to say. To all that concerned their
common past she was aware of offering a numbed soul. But her silence
evidently perplexed him, and in his perplexity he began to lose his footing,
and to flounder in a sea of words.
“Lizzie! Do you hear me? If I was mistaken, I say—and I hope I’m not
above owning that at times I may be mistaken; if I was—why, by God, my
dear, no woman ever heard me speak the words before; but here I am to
have and to hold, as the Book says! Why, hadn’t you realized it? Lizzie,
look up—! I’m asking you to marry me.”
Still, for a moment, she made no reply, but stood gazing about her as if
she had the sudden sense of unseen presences between them. At length she
gave a faint laugh. It visibly ruffled her visitor.
“I’m not conscious,” he began again, “of having said anything
particularly laughable—” He stopped and scrutinized her narrowly, as
though checked by the thought that there might be something not quite
normal.... Then, apparently reassured, he half-murmured his only French
phrase: “La joie fait peur ... eh?”
 She did not seem to hear. “I wasn’t laughing at you,” she said, “but only
at the coincidences of life. It was in this room that my husband asked me to
marry him.”
“Ah?” Her suitor appeared politely doubtful of the good taste, or the
opportunity, of producing this reminiscence. But he made another call on
his magnanimity. “Really? But, I say, my dear, I couldn’t be expected to
know it, could I? If I’d guessed that such a painful association—”
“Painful?” She turned upon him. “A painful association? Do you think
that was what I meant?” Her voice sank. “This room is sacred to me.”
She had her eyes on his face, which, perhaps because of its architectural
completeness, seemed to lack the mobility necessary to follow such a leap
of thought. It was so ostensibly a solid building, and not a nomad’s tent. He
struggled with a ruffled pride, rose again to playful magnanimity, and
murmured: “Compassionate angel!”
“Oh, compassionate? To whom? Do you imagine—did I ever say
anything to make you doubt the truth of what I’m telling you?”
His brows fretted: his temper was up. “Say anything? No,” he insinuated
ironically; then, in a hasty plunge after his lost forbearance, added with
exquisite mildness: “Your tact was perfect ... always. I’ve invariably done
you that justice. No one could have been more thoroughly the ... the lady. I
never failed to admire your good-breeding in avoiding any reference to your
... your other life.”
She faced him steadily. “Well, that other life was my life—my only life!
Now you know.”
There was a silence. Henry Prest drew out a monogrammed
handkerchief and passed it over his dry lips. As he did so, a whiff of his eau
de Cologne reached her, and she winced a little. It was evident that he was
seeking what to say next; wondering, rather helplessly, how to get back his
lost command of the situation. He finally induced his features to break
again into a persuasive smile.
“Not your only life, dearest,” he reproached her.
She met it instantly. “Yes; so you thought—because I chose you should.”
“You chose—?” The smile became incredulous.
“Oh, deliberately. But I suppose I’ve no excuse that you would not
dislike to hear.... Why shouldn’t we break off now?”
 “Break off ... this conversation?” His tone was aggrieved. “Of course
I’ve no wish to force myself—”
She interrupted him with a raised hand. “Break off for good, Henry.”
“For good?” He stared, and gave a quick swallow, as though the dose
were choking him. “For good? Are you really—? You and I? Is this serious,
Lizzie?”
“Perfectly. But if you prefer to hear ... what can only be painful....”
He straightened himself, threw back his shoulders, and said in an
uncertain voice: “I hope you don’t take me for a coward.”
She made no direct reply, but continued: “Well, then, you thought I
loved you, I suppose—”
He smiled again, revived his moustache with a slight twist, and gave a
hardly perceptible shrug. “You ... ah ... managed to produce the illusion....”
“Oh, well, yes: a woman can—so easily! That’s what men often forget.
You thought I was a lovelorn mistress; and I was only an expensive
prostitute.”
“Elizabeth!” he gasped, pale now to the ruddy eyelids. She saw that the
word had wounded more than his pride, and that, before realizing the insult
to his love, he was shuddering at the offence to his taste. Mistress!
Prostitute! Such words were banned. No one reproved coarseness of
language in women more than Henry Prest; one of Mrs. Hazeldean’s
greatest charms (as he had just told her) had been her way of remaining,
“through it all,” so ineffably “the lady.” He looked at her as if a fresh doubt
of her sanity had assailed him.
“Shall I go on?” she smiled.
He bent his head stiffly. “I am still at a loss to imagine for what purpose
you made a fool of me.”
“Well, then, it was as I say. I wanted money—money for my husband.”
He moistened his lips. “For your husband?”
“Yes; when he began to be so ill; when he needed comforts, luxury, the
opportunity to get away. He saved me, when I was a girl, from untold
humiliation and wretchedness. No one else lifted a finger to help me—not
one of my own family. I hadn’t a penny or a friend. Mrs. Mant had grown
sick of me, and was trying to find an excuse to throw me over. Oh, you
don’t know what a girl has to put up with—a girl alone in the world—who
depends for her clothes, and her food, and the roof over her head, on the
whims of a vain capricious old woman! It was because he knew, because he
understood, that he married me.... He took me out of misery into
blessedness. He put me up above them all ... he put me beside himself. I
didn’t care for anything but that; I didn’t care for the money or the freedom;
I cared only for him. I would have followed him into the desert—I would
have gone barefoot to be with him. I would have starved, begged, done
anything for him—anything.” She broke off, her voice lost in a sob. She
was no longer aware of Prest’s presence—all her consciousness was
absorbed in the vision she had evoked. “It was he who cared—who wanted
me to be rich and independent and admired! He wanted to heap everything
on me—during the first years I could hardly persuade him to keep enough
money for himself.... And then he was taken ill; and as he got worse, and
gradually dropped out of affairs, his income grew smaller, and then stopped
altogether; and all the while there were new expenses piling up—nurses,
doctors, travel; and he grew frightened; frightened not for himself but for
me.... And what was I to do? I had to pay for things somehow. For the first
year I managed to put off paying—then I borrowed small sums here and
there. But that couldn’t last. And all the while I had to keep on looking
pretty and prosperous, or else he began to worry, and think we were ruined,
and wonder what would become of me if he didn’t get well. By the time
you came I was desperate—I would have done anything, anything! He
thought the money came from my Portuguese stepmother. She really was
rich, as it happens. Unluckily my poor father tried to invest her money, and
lost it all; but when they were first married she sent a thousand dollars—and
all the rest, all you gave me, I built on that.”
She paused pantingly, as if her tale were at an end. Gradually her
consciousness of present things returned, and she saw Henry Prest, as if far
off, a small indistinct figure looming through the mist of her blurred eyes.
She thought to herself: “He doesn’t believe me,” and the thought
exasperated her.
“You wonder, I suppose,” she began again, “that a woman should dare
confess such things about herself—”
He cleared his throat. “About herself? No; perhaps not. But about her
husband.”
 The blood rushed to her forehead. “About her husband? But you don’t
dare to imagine—?”
“You leave me,” he rejoined icily, “no other inference that I can see.”
She stood dumbfounded, and he added: “At any rate, it certainly explains
your extraordinary coolness—pluck, I used to think it. I perceive that I
needn’t have taken such precautions.”
She considered this. “You think, then, that he knew? You think, perhaps,
that I knew he did?” She pondered again painfully, and then her face lit up.
“He never knew—never! That’s enough for me—and for you it doesn’t
matter. Think what you please. He was happy to the end—that’s all I care
for.”
“There can be no doubt about your frankness,” he said with pinched lips.
“There’s no longer any reason for not being frank.”
He picked up his hat, and studiously considered its lining; then he took
the gloves he had laid in it, and drew them thoughtfully through his hands.
She thought: “Thank God, he’s going!”
But he set the hat and gloves down on a table, and moved a little nearer
to her. His face looked as ravaged as a reveller’s at daybreak.
“You—leave positively nothing to the imagination!” he murmured.
“I told you it was useless—” she began; but he interrupted her:
“Nothing, that is—if I believed you.” He moistened his lips again, and
tapped them with his handkerchief. Again she had a whiff of the eau de
Cologne. “But I don’t!” he proclaimed. “Too many memories ... too many
... proofs, my dearest ...” He stopped, smiling somewhat convulsively. She
saw that he imagined the smile would soothe her.
She remained silent, and he began once more, as if appealing to her
against her own verdict: “I know better, Lizzie. In spite of everything, I
know you’re not that kind of woman.”
“I took your money—”
“As a favour. I knew the difficulties of your position.... I understood
completely. I beg of you never again to allude to—all that.” It dawned on
her that anything would be more endurable to him than to think he had been
a dupe—and one of two dupes! The part was not one that he could conceive
of having played. His pride was up in arms to defend her, not so much for
her sake as for his own. The discovery gave her a baffling sense of
helplessness; against that impenetrable self-sufficiency all her affirmations
might spend themselves in vain.
“No man who has had the privilege of being loved by you could ever for
a moment....”
She raised her head and looked at him. “You have never had that
privilege,” she interrupted.
His jaw fell. She saw his eyes pass from uneasy supplication to a cold
anger. He gave a little inarticulate grunt before his voice came back to him.
“You spare no pains in degrading yourself in my eyes.”
“I am not degrading myself. I am telling you the truth. I needed money. I
knew no way of earning it. You were willing to give it ... for what you call
the privilege....”
“Lizzie,” he interrupted solemnly, “don’t go on! I believe I enter into all
your feelings—I believe I always have. In so sensitive, so hypersensitive a
nature, there are moments when every other feeling is swept away by
scruples.... For those scruples I only honour you the more. But I won’t hear
another word now. If I allowed you to go on in your present state of ...
nervous exaltation ... you might be the first to deplore.... I wish to forget
everything you have said.... I wish to look forward, not back....” He squared
his shoulders, took a deep breath, and fixed her with a glance of recovered
confidence. “How little you know me if you believe that I could fail you
now!”
She returned his look with a weary steadiness. “You are kind—you mean
to be generous, I’m sure. But don’t you see that I can’t marry you?”
“I only see that, in the natural rush of your remorse—”
“Remorse? Remorse?” She broke in with a laugh. “Do you imagine I
feel any remorse? I’d do it all over again tomorrow—for the same object! I
got what I wanted—I gave him that last year, that last good year. It was the
relief from anxiety that kept him alive, that kept him happy. Oh, he was
happy—I know that!” She turned to Prest with a strange smile. “I do thank
you for that—I’m not ungrateful.”
“You ... you ... ungrateful? This ... is really ... indecent....” He took up
his hat again, and stood in the middle of the room as if waiting to be waked
from a bad dream.
“You are—rejecting an opportunity—” he began.
 She made a faint motion of assent.
“You do realize it? I’m still prepared to—to help you, if you should....”
She made no answer, and he continued: “How do you expect to live—since
you have chosen to drag in such considerations?”
“I don’t care how I live. I never wanted the money for myself.”
He raised a deprecating hand. “Oh, don’t—again! The woman I had
meant to....” Suddenly, to her surprise, she saw a glitter of moisture on his
lower lids. He applied his handkerchief to them, and the waft of scent
checked her momentary impulse of compunction. That Cologne water! It
called up picture after picture with a hideous precision. “Well, it was worth
it,” she murmured doggedly.
Henry Prest restored his handkerchief to his pocket. He waited, glanced
about the room, turned back to her.
“If your decision is final—”
“Oh, final!”
He bowed. “There is one thing more—which I should have mentioned if
you had ever given me the opportunity of seeing you after—after last New
Year’s day. Something I preferred not to commit to writing—”
“Yes?” she questioned indifferently.
“Your husband, you are positively convinced, had no idea ... that day
...?”
“None.”
“Well, others, it appears, had.” He paused. “Mrs. Wesson saw us.”
“So I supposed. I remember now that she went out of her way to cut me
that evening at Mrs. Struthers’s.”
“Exactly. And she was not the only person who saw us. If people had not
been disarmed by your husband’s falling ill that very day you would have
found yourself—ostracized.”
She made no comment, and he pursued, with a last effort: “In your grief,
your solitude, you haven’t yet realized what your future will be—how
difficult. It is what I wished to guard you against—it was my purpose in
asking you to marry me.” He drew himself up and smiled as if he were
looking at his own reflection in a mirror, and thought favourably of it. “A
man who has had the misfortune to compromise a woman is bound in
honour—Even if my own inclination were not what it is, I should
consider....”
She turned to him with a softened smile. Yes, he had really brought
himself to think that he was proposing to marry her to save her reputation.
At this glimpse of the old hackneyed axioms on which he actually believed
that his conduct was based, she felt anew her remoteness from the life he
would have drawn her back to.
“My poor Henry, don’t you see how far I’ve got beyond the Mrs.
Wessons? If all New York wants to ostracize me, let it! I’ve had my day ...
no woman has more than one. Why shouldn’t I have to pay for it? I’m
ready.”
“Good heavens!” he murmured.
She was aware that he had put forth his last effort. The wound she had
inflicted had gone to the most vital spot; she had prevented his being
magnanimous, and the injury was unforgivable. He was glad, yes, actually
glad now, to have her know that New York meant to cut her; but, strive as
she might, she could not bring herself to care either for the fact, or for his
secret pleasure in it. Her own secret pleasures were beyond New York’s
reach and his.
“I’m sorry,” she reiterated gently. He bowed, without trying to take her
hand, and left the room.
As the door closed she looked after him with a dazed stare. “He’s right, I
suppose; I don’t realize yet—” She heard the shutting of the outer door, and
dropped to the sofa, pressing her hands against her aching eyes. At that
moment, for the first time, she asked herself what the next day, and the
next, would be like....
“If only I cared more about reading,” she moaned, remembering how
vainly she had tried to acquire her husband’s tastes, and how gently and
humorously he had smiled at her efforts. “Well—there are always cards;
and when I get older, knitting and patience, I suppose. And if everybody
cuts me I shan’t need any evening dresses. That will be an economy, at any
rate,” she concluded with a little shiver.
 VII
“S HE was bad ... always. They used to meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel.”
I must go back now to this phrase of my mother’s—the phrase
from which, at the opening of my narrative, I broke away for a time
in order to project more vividly on the scene that anxious moving vision of
Lizzie Hazeldean: a vision in which memories of my one boyish glimpse of
her were pieced together with hints collected afterward.
When my mother uttered her condemnatory judgment I was a young
man of twenty-one, newly graduated from Harvard, and at home again
under the family roof in New York. It was long since I had heard Mrs.
Hazeldean spoken of. I had been away, at school and at Harvard, for the
greater part of the interval, and in the holidays she was probably not
considered a fitting subject of conversation, especially now that my sisters
came to the table.
At any rate, I had forgotten everything I might ever have picked up about
her when, on the evening after my return, my cousin Hubert Wesson—now
towering above me as a pillar of the Knickerbocker Club, and a final
authority on the ways of the world—suggested our joining her at the opera.
“Mrs. Hazeldean? But I don’t know her. What will she think?”
“That it’s all right. Come along. She’s the jolliest woman I know. We’ll
go back afterward and have supper with her—jolliest house I know.”
Hubert twirled a self-conscious moustache.
We were dining at the Knickerbocker, to which I had just been elected,
and the bottle of Pommery we were finishing disposed me to think that
nothing could be more fitting for two men of the world than to end their
evening in the box of the jolliest woman Hubert knew. I groped for my own
moustache, gave a twirl in the void, and followed him, after meticulously
sliding my overcoat sleeve around my silk hat as I had seen him do.
But once in Mrs. Hazeldean’s box I was only an overgrown boy again,
bathed in such blushes as used, at the same age, to visit Hubert, forgetting
that I had a moustache to twirl, and knocking my hat from the peg on which
I had just hung it, in my zeal to pick up a programme she had not dropped.
 For she was really too lovely—too formidably lovely. I was used by now
to mere unadjectived loveliness, the kind that youth and spirits hang like a
rosy veil over commonplace features, an average outline and a pointless
merriment. But this was something calculated, accomplished, finished—and
just a little worn. It frightened me with my first glimpse of the infinity of
beauty and the multiplicity of her pit-falls. What! There were women who
need not fear crow’s-feet, were more beautiful for being pale, could let a
silver hair or two show among the dark, and their eyes brood inwardly
while they smiled and, chatted? But then no young man was safe for a
moment! But then the world I had hitherto known had been only a warm
pink nursery, while this new one was a place of darkness, perils and
enchantments....
It was the next day that one of my sisters asked me where I had been the
evening before, and that I puffed out my chest to answer: “With Mrs.
Hazeldean—at the opera.” My mother looked up, but did not speak till the
governess had swept the girls off; then she said with pinched lips: “Hubert
Wesson took you to Mrs. Hazeldean’s box?”
“Yes.”
“Well, a young man may go where he pleases. I hear Hubert is still
infatuated; it serves Sabina right for not letting him marry the youngest
Lyman girl. But don’t mention Mrs. Hazeldean again before your sisters....
They say her husband never knew—I suppose if he had she would never
have got old Miss Cecilia Winter’s money.” And it was then that my mother
pronounced the name of Henry Prest, and added that phrase about the Fifth
Avenue Hotel which suddenly woke my boyish memories....
In a flash I saw again, under its quickly-lowered veil, the face with the
exposed eyes and the frozen smile, and felt through my grown-up waistcoat
the stab to my boy’s heart and the loosened murmur of my soul; felt all this,
and at the same moment tried to relate that former face, so fresh and clear
despite its anguish, to the smiling guarded countenance of Hubert’s “jolliest
woman I know.”
I was familiar with Hubert’s indiscriminate use of his one adjective, and
had not expected to find Mrs. Hazeldean “jolly” in the literal sense: in the
case of the lady he happened to be in love with the epithet simply meant
that she justified his choice. Nevertheless, as I compared Mrs. Hazeldean’s
earlier face to this one, I had my first sense of what may befall in the long
years between youth and maturity, and of how short a distance I had
travelled on that mysterious journey. If only she would take me by the
hand!
I was not wholly unprepared for my mother’s comment. There was no
other lady in Mrs. Hazeldean’s box when we entered; none joined her
during the evening, and our hostess offered no apology for her isolation. In
the New York of my youth every one knew what to think of a woman who
was seen “alone at the opera”; if Mrs. Hazeldean was not openly classed
with Fanny Ring, our one conspicuous “professional,” it was because, out
of respect for her social origin, New York preferred to avoid such
juxtapositions. Young as I was, I knew this social law, and had guessed,
before the evening was over, that Mrs. Hazeldean was not a lady on whom
other ladies called, though she was not, on the other hand, a lady whom it
was forbidden to mention to other ladies. So I did mention her, with
bravado.
No ladies showed themselves at the opera with Mrs. Hazeldean; but one
or two dropped in to the jolly supper announced by Hubert, an
entertainment whose jollity consisted in a good deal of harmless banter over
broiled canvas-backs and celery, with the best of champagne. These same
ladies I sometimes met at her house afterward. They were mostly younger
than their hostess, and still, though precariously, within the social pale:
pretty trivial creatures, bored with a monotonous prosperity, and yearning
for such unlawful joys as cigarettes, plain speaking, and a drive home in the
small hours with the young man of the moment. But such daring spirits
were few in old New York, their appearances infrequent and somewhat
furtive. Mrs. Hazeldean’s society consisted mainly of men, men of all ages,
from her bald or grey-headed contemporaries to youths of Hubert’s
accomplished years and raw novices of mine.
A great dignity and decency prevailed in her little circle. It was not the
oppressive respectability which weighs on the reformed déclassée, but the
air of ease imparted by a woman of distinction who has wearied of society
and closed her doors to all save her intimates. One always felt, at Lizzie
Hazeldean’s, that the next moment one’s grandmother and aunts might be
announced; and yet so pleasantly certain that they wouldn’t be.
What is there in the atmosphere of such houses that makes them so
enchanting to a fastidious and imaginative youth? Why is it that “those
women” (as the others call them) alone know how to put the awkward at
ease, check the familiar, smile a little at the over-knowing, and yet
encourage naturalness in all? The difference of atmosphere is felt on the
very threshold. The flowers grow differently in their vases, the lamps and
easy-chairs have found a cleverer way of coming together, the books on the
table are the very ones that one is longing to get hold of. The most perilous
coquetry may not be in a woman’s way of arranging her dress but in her
way of arranging her drawing-room; and in this art Mrs. Hazeldean
excelled.
I have spoken of books; even then they were usually the first objects to
attract me in a room, whatever else of beauty it contained; and I remember,
on the evening of that first “jolly supper,” coming to an astonished pause
before the crowded shelves that took up one wall of the drawing-room.
What! The goddess read, then? She could accompany one on those flights
too? Lead one, no doubt? My heart beat high....
But I soon learned that Lizzie Hazeldean did not read. She turned but
languidly even the pages of the last Ouida novel; and I remember seeing
Mallock’s New Republic uncut on her table for weeks. It took me no long
time to make the discovery: at my very next visit she caught my glance of
surprise in the direction of the rich shelves, smiled, coloured a little, and
met it with the confession: “No, I can’t read them. I’ve tried—I have tried
—but print makes me sleepy. Even novels do....” “They” were the
accumulated treasures of English poetry, and a rich and varied selection of
history, criticism, letters, in English, French and Italian—she spoke these
languages, I knew—books evidently assembled by a sensitive and widely-
ranging reader. We were alone at the time, and Mrs. Hazeldean went on in a
lower tone: “I kept just the few he liked best—my husband, you know.” It
was the first time that Charles Hazeldean’s name had been spoken between
us, and my surprise was so great that my candid cheek must have reflected
the blush on hers. I had fancied that women in her situation avoided
alluding to their husbands. But she continued to look at me, wistfully,
humbly almost, as if there were something more that she wanted to say, and
was inwardly entreating me to understand.
“He was a great reader: a student. And he tried so hard to make me read
too—he wanted to share everything with me. And I did like poetry—some
poetry—when he read it aloud to me. After his death I thought: ‘There’ll be
his books. I can go back to them—I shall find him there.’ And I tried—oh,
Welcome to Our Bookstore - The Ultimate Destination for Book Lovers
Are you passionate about books and eager to explore new worlds of
knowledge? At our website, we offer a vast collection of books that
cater to every interest and age group. From classic literature to
specialized publications, self-help books, and children’s stories, we
have it all! Each book is a gateway to new adventures, helping you
expand your knowledge and nourish your soul
Experience Convenient and Enjoyable Book Shopping Our website is more
than just an online bookstore—it’s a bridge connecting readers to the
timeless values of culture and wisdom. With a sleek and user-friendly
interface and a smart search system, you can find your favorite books
quickly and easily. Enjoy special promotions, fast home delivery, and
a seamless shopping experience that saves you time and enhances your
love for reading.
Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and
personal growth!

ebookgate.com