s of an evening. To tell the truth she
fascinated me. I had always held the theory that no married woman could
be an absolute fool. It had seemed to me that such contact with the
realities of life as marriage involved must leave some austere mark of
intelligence, some tinge of altruism, upon the most superficial. She
seemed to disprove this. For her the world did not exist save for the
'angel child.' Even her husband was now only the nearly indispensable
producer of income. She talked, not of him, or of her family, not of Art
or Life or Death or the world to come, not even of Home or the things
she had seen in Alexandria. She had seen nothing in Alexandria. She had
declined to let Jack take her to Cairo 'because of the expense.' She
read no books nor papers. She dressed in perfect propriety. And all the
time she talked about the child, one hand near the child, her eyes fixed
on the child's movements or repose. I think the voyage was a revelation
to Jack. He was finding his place in the world. He was thinking in his
honest, clumsy way. He never took his wife for a trip again. He loved
his child as much as any man could, but this ingrowing infatuation, to
the exclusion of every other desirable thing in the world, was
fatiguing.

"And Artemisia! She sat in her little spare cabin opening on the saloon,
and now and again she would raise her shoulders, draw a deep breath, let
them drop again as though in despair, and go on with her sewing. She
would laugh at me when I tried to amuse the child and distract it from
some preposterous desire. It was not easy. Her tenacity of purpose was
appalling. She was yelling one evening for someone to open the great
medicine chest that stood by the brass fireplace. I tried the
time-honoured ruses for placating the young. I said there was a lion
inside who would jump out and eat Babs. I pretended to go and find the
key and came back with the news that naughty Mr. Siddons had dropped it
into the sea. The brat stopped to breathe for a moment and a faintly
human expression came over the stupendously smug little face. I followed
this up by a story of how Mr. Siddons had shown me how to make a pin
float on the water. I hastily poured some water into a glass, got a
piece of blotting paper, laid my pin on it, and waited for the homely
trick to succeed. I had no luck somehow. The pin went to the bottom and
Babs' opinion of me went with it. She suddenly remembered about the
medicine chest and gave a p