y one
comfort," she added pathetically, "is that only you and mother know how
he treats me."

Her pretty vacant face with its faded bloom resembled a pastel portrait
in which the artist had forgotten to paint an expression. "Poor Jane
Gracey," as she was generally called, had wasted the last ten years in a
futile effort to hide the fact of an unfortunate marriage beneath an
excessively cheerful manner. She talked continually because talking
seemed to her the most successful way of "keeping up an appearance."
Though everybody who knew her knew also that Charley Gracey neglected
her shamefully, she spent twelve hours of the twenty-four pretending
that she was perfectly happy. At nineteen she had been a belle and
beauty of the willowy sort; but at thirty she had relapsed into one of
the women whom men admire in theory and despise in reality. She had
started with a natural tendency to clinging sweetness; as the years went
on the sweetness, instead of growing fainter, had become almost cloying,
while the clinging had hysterically tightened into a clutch. Charley
Gracey, who had married her under the mistaken impression that her type
was restful for a reforming rake, (not realizing that there is nothing
so mentally disturbing as a fool) had been changed by marriage from a
gay bird of the barnyard into a veritable hawk of the air. His behaviour
was the scandal of the town, yet the greater his sins, the intenser grew
Jane's sweetness, the more twining her hold. "Nobody will ever think of
blaming you, darling," said Mrs. Carr consolingly. "You have behaved
beautifully from the beginning. We all know what a perfect wife you have
been."

"I've tried to do my duty even if Charley failed in his," replied the
perfect wife, unfastening the hooks of her small heliotrope wrap trimmed
with tarnished silver passementerie. Above her short flaxen "bang" she
wore a crumpled purple hat ornamented with bunches of velvet pansies;
and though it was two years old, and out of fashion at a period when
fashions changed less rapidly, it lent an air of indecent festivity to
her tearful face. Her youth was already gone, for her beauty had been of
the fragile kind that breaks early, and her wan, aristocratic features
had settled into the downward droop which comes to the faces of people
who habitually "expect the worst."

"I know, Jane, I know," murmured Mrs. Carr, dropping her thimble as she
nervously tried to hasten her sewing. "But don't you think