est feeling, let me tell you, that I ever saw you display)
even that man found my conduct perfectly proper. His own word. Proper.
So eminently proper that it altogether silenced his objections."

Mr. Travers shifted uneasily on his seat.

"It's my belief, Edith, that if you had been a man you would have led
a most irregular life. You would have been a frank adventurer. I mean
morally. It has been a great grief to me. You have a scorn in you for
the serious side of life, for the ideas and the ambitions of the social
sphere to which you belong."

He stopped because his wife had clasped again her hands behind her head
and was no longer looking at him.

"It's perfectly obvious," he began again. "We have been living amongst
most distinguished men and women and your attitude to them has been
always so--so negative! You would never recognize the importance of
achievements, of acquired positions. I don't remember you ever admiring
frankly any political or social success. I ask myself what after all you
could possibly have expected from life."

"I could never have expected to hear such a speech from you. As to what
I did expect! . . . I must have been very stupid."

"No, you are anything but that," declared Mr. Travers, conscientiously.
"It isn't stupidity." He hesitated for a moment. "It's a kind of
wilfulness, I think. I preferred not to think about this grievous
difference in our points of view, which, you will admit, I could not
have possibly foreseen before we. . . ."

A sort of solemn embarrassment had come over Mr. Travers. Mrs. Travers,
leaning her chin on the palm of her hand, stared at the bare matchboard
side of the hut.

"Do you charge me with profound girlish duplicity?" she asked, very
softly.

The inside of the deckhouse was full of stagnant heat perfumed by
a slight scent which seemed to emanate from the loose mass of Mrs.
Travers' hair. Mr. Travers evaded the direct question which struck him
as lacking fineness even to the point of impropriety.

"I must suppose that I was not in the calm possession of my insight and
judgment in those days," he said. "I--I was not in a critical state of
mind at the time," he admitted further; but even after going so far
he did not look up at his wife and therefore missed something like
the ghost of a smile on Mrs. Travers' lips. That smile was tinged with
scepticism which was too deep-seated for anything but the faintest
expression. Therefore she said nothing, and Mr.