, or imagine that anything can shake his friendship or his
desire to be of service."

CHAPTER XXII.

"The worst thing about the life of you married people," said Valeria,
"is its ridiculous rigidity. It takes more energy to get the dinner
delayed for a quarter of an hour in most well-regulated houses, or some
slight change in routine, than to alter a frontier, or pass an Act of
Parliament."

Hadria laughed. "Until you discovered this by personal inconvenience,
you always scolded me for my disposition to jeer at the domestic
scheme."

"It _is_ a little geometrical," Valeria admitted.

"Geometrical! It is like a gigantic ordnance map palmed off on one
instead of a real landscape."

"Come now, to be just, say an Italian garden."

"That flatters it, but the simile will do. The eye sees to the end of
every path, and knows that it leads to nothing."

"Ah! dear Hadria, but all the pathways of the world have that very same
goal."

"At least some of them have the good taste to wind a little, and thus
disguise the fact. And think of the wild flowers one may gather by the
wayside in some forest track, or among the mountain passes; but in these
prim alleys what natural thing can one know? Brain and heart grow tame
and clipped to match the hedges, or take on grotesque shapes----"

"That one must guard against."

"Oh, I am sick of guarding against things. To be always warding off
evil, is an evil in itself. Better let it come."

Valeria looked at her companion anxiously.

"One knows how twirling round in a circle makes one giddy, or following
the same path stupefies. How does the polar bear feel, I wonder, after
he has walked up and down in his cage for years and years?"

"Used to it, I imagine," said Valeria.

"But before he gets used to it, that is the bad time. And then it is all
so confusing----"

Hadria sat on the low parapet of the terrace at the Priory. Valeria had
a place on the topmost step, where the sun had been beating all the
morning. Hadria had taken off her hat to enjoy the warmth. The long
sprays of the roses were blown across her now and then. Once, a thorn
had left a mark of blood upon her hand.

Valeria gathered a spray, and nodded slowly.

"I don't want to allow emotion to get the better of me, Valeria. I don't
want to run rank like some overgrown weed, and so I dread the
accumulation of emotion--emotion that has never had a good explosive
utterance. One has to be so discreet in the