air-well, spoken of by the agent as "the court." The
rent was fifty dollars, and Wallace considered the place a bargain.

For the first day or two Martie laughed bravely at her surroundings,
finding in this vase or that picture cause for great amusement. She
promised herself that she would store some of these horrors, but
inasmuch as there was not a spare inch in the flat for storage, it was
decidedly simplest to leave them where they were. Wallace did not mind
them, and Wallace's happiness was her aim in life.

But, strangely, after the first excitement of his return was over, a
cool distaste descended upon her. Before the first weeks of the new
life were over, she found herself watching her husband with almost
hostile eyes. It must be wrong for a wife to feel so abysmal--so
overwhelming an indifference toward the man whose name she bore.
Wallace, weary with the moving, his collar off, his thick neck bare,
his big pale face streaked with drying perspiration, was her husband
after all. She was angry at herself for noticing that his sleek hair
was thinning, that the old look of something not fine was stamped more
deeply upon his face. She resolutely suppressed the deepening
resentment that grew under his kisses; kisses scented with alcohol.

Generations of unquestioning wives behind her, she sternly routed the
unbidden doubts, she deliberately put from her thoughts many another
disillusion as the days went by. She was a married woman now, protected
and busy; she must not dream like a romantic girl. There was
delightfully novel cooking to do; there was freedom from hateful
business responsibility. All beginnings were hard, she told her
shrinking soul; she was herself changed by the years; what wonder that
Wallace was changed?

Perhaps in his case it was less change than the logical development of
qualities that would have been distinctly discernible to clearer eyes
than hers in the very hour of their meeting. Wallace had always drifted
with the current, as he was drifting now. He would have been as glad as
she, had success come instead of failure; he did not even now
habitually neglect his work, nor habitually drink. It was merely that
his engagement was much less distinguished than he had told her it was,
his part was smaller, his pay smaller, and his chances of promotion
lessening with every year. He had never been a student of life, nor
interested in anything that did not touch his own comfort; but in the
first day