d that's the end of him."

Milly felt moved to put a word in here in behalf of her sex, but the
child's cry came more loudly and as she left she heard her husband ask
mildly,--

"And how about the children?"

"Oh, the kids--that's woman's business," the fat man replied carelessly.
"Pass the cigarettes, will you," and the talk went off somewhere
else....

Children were not all "woman's business," Milly felt indignantly. She
had surprised her pretty little maid Yvonne in a lonely lane one
moonlight night, in company with a tall man, who did not look like a
Breton. She had reported the fact to her husband, with her suspicions as
to the tall man, observing,--"Men are so horrid!" to which Jack had
merely laughed easily. She had scolded him for his frivolity, also
scolded Yvonne, who cried, yet somehow seemed to smile through her
tears.

To-night when her husband came up for bed, she asked seriously,--

"You don't believe all that stuff Steve Belchers was saying, do you?"

"What stuff?"

"About artists and women."

Bragdon yawned and laughed. Milly came close to him and put her arm
about his neck.

"You don't feel that your temperament is ruined by marriage, do you?"

"Never knew I had one before," he replied jokingly.

"Because you know if you ever want your freedom, you can have it."

"Thanks."

"If you need that sort of experience, I shan't stand in your way," she
concluded in a heroic burst....

Nevertheless she was glad that her husband had shown no symptoms
hitherto of this dangerous "temperament" and was content to be as
_bourgeois_ as the best. All the time there was growing in her a sense
of sex distinction, and a dislike, or rather disapproval, of men as a
whole. God, she was convinced, as the Southerner had said, had meant the
perfect type to be Woman, rather than Man.

IX

THE PARDON

One day the noisy chatter at the mid-day meal was interrupted by the
terrific splutter and throbbing of a motor-car. Those were still the
days when touring cars with strangely clad occupants were less familiar,
even on French roads, than they have since become, and the machines
announced themselves from afar by their ponderous groans. Very few cars,
indeed, got down to this secluded Brittany village which was reached by
only one road of the third class that penetrated the little peninsula
from Morlaix, a number of miles away to the north.

So every one left the table and crowded to the terrace wall t