rdinate place in the average American life about her. The marital
unhappiness, estrangement, and fragmentary incompleteness in the circle
she knew, over which she had grieved and puzzled, had nothing to do with
what novels mean by "unfaithfulness." The women of Endbury, unlike the
heroines of fiction, did not fear that their husbands would fall in love
with other women. The men of Endbury spent as little time in
sentimentalizing over other men's wives as they did over their own.

She often wondered why writers did not treat of the other problems that
beset her class--for instance, why it was only women in frontier
conditions, like Harry's wife, who could share in their husband's lives;
why nobody tried to change things so that they could do more of their
part in the work of the world; why they could not have a share in the
activities that gave other men, even little boys like Walter, so much
closer knowledge of their husbands' characters than they, their wives,
had. She had a dim notion, caught from stray indications in the
magazines, that writers were considering such questions in books other
than novels, but she had no idea how to search them out. The woman's
club to which she belonged was occupied with the art of Masaccio, who
was, so a visitor from Chicago's aesthetic circles informed them, the
"latest thing" in art interests.

She decided to ask Paul if he had heard of such books. She would ask him
so many such questions in the new life that was to begin. They had been
married more than three years and, so far as their relations to each
other went, they were by no means inharmonious; but of the close-knit,
deep-rooted intimacy of soul and mind that had been her dream of
married life, there had not been even a beginning. Well, she told
herself bravely, four years were but a short period in a lifetime. They
were both so young yet. They could begin now.

Paul came back from the telephone, note-book in hand, jotting down some
figures. He smiled at her over the top of the book, and before he sat
down to his desk he covered her carefully with a shawl, stroked her
hair, and closed her eyes, saying with an absent tenderness: "There!
take a nap, dear, while I finish these notes."

He looked supremely satisfied with himself in the instant before he
plunged into his calculations, and Lydia guessed that he was
congratulating himself on having remembered her in the midst of
absorbing business cares. She lay looking at him as