ecure for his son a prosperous
career, but because she was so thankful to see a strange, unaccountable
girl like Hadria settling quietly down, with a couple of children to
keep her out of mischief.

That was what it had come to! Perhaps they calculated a little too
surely. Possibly even two children might not keep her entirely out of
mischief. Out of what impulse of malice had Fate pitched upon the most
essentially mutinous and erratic of the whole brood, for the sedatest
_role_? But perhaps Fate, too, had calculated unscientifically. Mischief
was always possible, if one gave one's mind to it. Or was she growing
too old to have the spirit for thorough-going devilry? Youth seemed
rather an affair of mental outlook than of years. She felt twenty years
older since her marriage. She wondered why it was that marriage did not
make all women wicked,--openly and actively so. If ever there was an
arrangement by which every evil instinct and every spark of the devil
was likely to be aroused and infuriated, surely the customs and
traditions that clustered round this estate constituted that dangerous
combination! Hardship, difficulty, tragedy could be faced, but not the
humiliating, the degrading, the contemptible. Hadria had her own
particular ideas as to what ought to be set down under these headings.
Most women, she found, ranked certain elements very differently, with
lavish use of halos and gilding in their honour, feeling perhaps, she
hinted, the dire need of such external decoration.

Good heavens! Did no other woman realize the insult of it all? Hadria
knew so few women intimately; none intimately enough to be convinced
that no such revolt lay smouldering beneath their smiles. She had a
lonely assurance that she had never met the sister-soul (for such there
must be by the score, as silent as she), who shared her rage and her
detestations. Valeria, with all her native pride, regarded these as
proof of a big flaw in an otherwise sound nature. Yet how deep, how
passionately strong, these feelings were, how gigantic the flaw!

What possessed people that they did not see what was so brutally clear?
As young girls led forth unconscious into the battle, with a bandage
over their eyes, and cotton-wool in their ears--yes, then it was
inevitable that they should see and hear nothing. Had they been newly
imported from the moon they could scarcely have less acquaintance with
terrestrial conditions; but afterwards, when ruthlessly, wi