ith them--angels couldn't."

She had once voiced this universally recognized maxim before Dr. Melton,
who had cut in briskly with a warm seconding of her theory. "Yes,
indeed; in the course of my practice I have often thought, as you do,
that it would be easier all around if husbands didn't board with their
wives at all."

Mrs. Emery had stared almost as blankly as Mrs. Sandworth herself might
have done. "I never said such a crazy thing," she protested.

"Didn't you? Perhaps I don't catch your idea then. It seemed to be that
every point of contact was sure to be an occasion for friction between
husband and wife, and so, of course, the fewer they were--"

"Oh, bother take you, Marius Melton!" Mrs. Emery had quite lost patience
with him. "I was just saying something that's so old, and has been said
so often, that it's a bromide, actually. And that is that it's a poor
wife who greets her tired husband in the evening with a long string of
tales about how the children have been naughty and the cook--"

"Oh, yes, yes; now I see. Of course. The happiest ideal of American
life, a peaceful exterior presented to the husband at all costs, and the
real state of things kept from him because it might interfere with his
capacity to pull off a big deal the next day."

Mrs. Emery had boggled suspiciously at this version of her statement,
but finding, on the whole, that it represented fairly enough her idea,
had given a qualified assent in the shape of silence and a turning of
the subject.

Lydia had not happened to hear that conversation, but she heard
innumerable ones like it without Dr. Melton's footnotes. On her wedding
day, therefore, she conceived it an essential feature of her duty toward
Paul to keep entirely to herself all of the dismaying difficulties of
housekeeping and keeping up a social position in America. She knew, as a
matter of course, that they would be dismaying. The talk of all her
married friends was full of the tragedies of domestic life. It had
occurred to her once or twice that it was an odd, almost a pathetic,
convention that they tried to maintain about their social existence--a
picture of their lives as running smoothly with self-adjusting machinery
of long-established servants and old social traditions; when their every
word tragically proclaimed the exhausting and never-ending personal
effort that was required to give even the most temporary appearance of
that kind. "We all know what a fearful time ev