ire to bury her head
in her pillow and "think out" her position had gone. She did not
apostrophize her fate, she did not weep; few real women do in the
access of calamity, or when there is anything else to be done. She felt
that she knew it all; she believed she had sounded the profoundest
depths of the disaster, and seemed already so old in her experience
that she almost fancied she had been prepared for it. Perhaps she did
not fully appreciate it. To a life like hers it was only an incident,
the mere turning of a page of the illimitable book of youth; the
breaking up of what she now felt had become a monotony. In fact, she
was not quite sure she had ever been satisfied with their present
success. Had it brought her all she expected? She wanted to say this to
her husband, not only to comfort him, poor fellow, but that they might
come to a better understanding of life in the future. She was not
perhaps different from other loving women, who, believing in this
unattainable goal of matrimony, have sought it in the various episodes
of fortune or reverses, in the bearing of children, or the loss of
friends. In her childless experience there was no other life that had
taken root in her circumstances and might suffer transplantation; only
she and her husband could lose or profit by the change. The "perfect"
understanding would come under other conditions than these.

She would have gone superstitiously to the window to gaze in the
direction of the vanished ship, but another instinct restrained her.
She would put aside all yearning for him until she had done something
to help him, and earned the confidence he seemed to have withheld.
Perhaps it was pride--perhaps she never really believed his exodus was
distant or complete.

With a full knowledge that to-morrow the various ornaments and pretty
trifles around her would be in the hands of the law, she gathered only
a few necessaries for her flight and some familiar personal trinkets. I
am constrained to say that this self-abnegation was more fastidious
than moral. She had no more idea of the ethics of bankruptcy than any
other charming woman; she simply did not like to take with her any
contagious memory of the chapter of the life just closing. She glanced
around the home she was leaving without a lingering regret; there was
no sentiment of tradition or custom that might be destroyed; her roots
lay too near the surface to suffer dislocation; the happiness of her
childless unio