a
wrong it would be so much easier! He irritates me so unspeakably, and I
seem to feel it more, now that I have you. That laboured chaffing of you
at breakfast--how could you have borne it? I can't pretend amusement,
and chaff is his only conception of human intercourse. I know I'm
horrid--I know it; but it is the long, long accumulations of repressed
exasperation that have made me so--worse than exasperations. I remember,
during the first months of our married life, when I was becoming
dreadfully frightened, catching glimpses on every side of my awful
mistake--I remember once kissing him and saying something playful that
hid an appeal for comfort, comprehension, reassurance. And do you know,
he answered me with a chaffing jest--a stupid, stupid jest--some piece
of would-be gallant folly. It was like a dagger!"

"Perhaps it pleased him so much, your kissing him, that it made him
shy," Christina suggested, but Milly said:--"Dick shy! Oh no, he is not
sensitive enough for shyness. He doesn't feel things at all as you, with
your exquisiteness, imagine. He isn't shy at all, and I'm afraid he is
sometimes immensely, hideously stupid."

After all, as Christina came to see, Dick's inevitable loss was her own
gain. Milly, who could not be her husband's, was hers, almost as a child
might have been. Christina, for the first time in her life, knew the
intoxicating experience of being sought out and needed. It was Milly who
turned to her; Milly who put out appealing hands, like a lonely child;
who nestled her head on her shoulder, contentedly sighing, as she begged
her please, please not to go until she had to--and couldn't she,
wouldn't she, stay on until the winter?

Why shouldn't she? Her own life was empty. It ended in her passing most
of the winter with Milly in the country after Dick had gone off to
India. It was a blissful winter, the happiest, in reality, that
Christina had ever known, though she was not aware of this nor aware
that it was the first time in her life that she was the recipient of as
much devotion as she gave. They read and rode and walked and talked and
carried on energetic reforms and charities in the village. Christina was
full of ardent enthusiasms which infected Milly. In spite of her
physical delicacy, for she had a weak heart, she showed an enterprise
and endurance that Milly was not capable of. The winter went by and life
was full of significance.

Then Christina asked Milly to come and stay with