t use was that to her now? He did not desire her; he was in love with
Alice, and Alice was in love with him. What would be the sense--even if
they all agreed--in the three of them making themselves miserable for
all their youth that they might be contented in their old age? Let age
fend for itself and leave youth to its own instincts. Let elderly saints
suffer--it was their _metier_--and youth drink the cup of life. It was a
pity Dick was the only "catch" available, but he was young and handsome.
Other girls had to put up with sixty and the gout.

Another point, a very serious point, had been overlooked. All that had
arrived to them in that dim future of the past had happened to them as
the results of their making the marriages they had made. To what fate
other roads would lead their knowledge could not tell them. Nellie
Fanshawe had become at forty a lovely character. Might not the hard life
she had led with her husband--a life calling for continual sacrifice,
for daily self-control--have helped towards this end? As the wife of a
poor curate of high moral principles, would the same result have been
secured? The fever that had robbed her of her beauty and turned her
thoughts inward had been the result of sitting out on the balcony of the
Paris Opera House with an Italian Count on the occasion of a fancy dress
ball. As the wife of an East End clergyman the chances are she would
have escaped that fever and its purifying effects. Was there not danger
in the position: a supremely beautiful young woman, worldly-minded,
hungry for pleasure, condemned to a life of poverty with a man she did
not care for? The influence of Alice upon Nathaniel Armitage, during
those first years when his character was forming, had been all for
good. Could he be sure that, married to Nellie, he might not have
deteriorated?

Were Alice Blatchley to marry an artist could she be sure that at forty
she would still be in sympathy with artistic ideals? Even as a child had
not her desire ever been in the opposite direction to that favoured
by her nurse? Did not the reading of Conservative journals invariably
incline her towards Radicalism, and the steady stream of Radical talk
round her husband's table invariably set her seeking arguments in favour
of the feudal system? Might it not have been her husband's growing
Puritanism that had driven her to crave for Bohemianism? Suppose that
towards middle age, the wife of a wild artist, she suddenly "took
relig