to what he would call my
unkindness and queerness. But as for tragedy, suffering;--one can't
associate such perturbing things with imperturbable Dick. I haven't to
reproach myself with having hurt his life seriously, and, Heaven knows!
I don't reproach his simplicity and harmlessness for having broken mine.
Marriage and a wife were incidents--incidents only--to him, and if they
have failed to be satisfactory incidents, he has other far more
absorbing interests in his life to take his mind off the breakdown of
his domestic happiness. Indeed, domesticity, when he cares to avail
himself of it, is always there in its superficial forms and ceremonies.
I can't pretend to love him, but I take care of his money and his house,
I entertain his friends, I give him his tea at breakfast and a decorous
kiss when he comes back from shooting animals in some savage country.
One could hardly call us separated, so discreetly do I bridge the chasm
with all the conventional observances. Thank Heaven! the shooting is his
one great passion, so that he is usually wandering happily in distant
jungles and not requiring too many _tete-a-tetes_ at breakfast of me."

"He is probably very good and kind," said Mrs. Drent, "but it is
incredible that such a man should be married to such a woman as you."

Again Milly gazed for a moment, aware of inappropriateness. "You have a
very high ideal of marriage, haven't you?" she said. Mrs. Drent's
husband had died five years before, and her baby when it was born. She
wore black, exquisite and unobtrusive always, and, unobtrusively, she
was known to be inconsolable. Yet Milly had heard it whispered that
Gilbert Drent had married her for her money and that, charming person
though he had been, she had passionately idealized him. There was,
therefore, with these memories at the back of her mind, something
painful as well as pathetic to her in the voice in which Mrs. Drent,
crimsoning deeply, said: "My own marriage was ideal. I don't understand
marriage unless it is ideal."

There was a silence after that for a moment and then Milly said, "It
must be wonderful to have such a memory. All I know is that I wish with
all my heart I had never married Dick, and I believe with all my heart
that one shouldn't marry unless everything is there."

"That is it," said Mrs. Drent, "everything must be there for it to be
right;--affinity, and understanding, and devotion. Some women can find
enough in the mere fact of a home an