s regarding immoral diseases really mean anything in
households such as we ourselves know.... She had reason to suppose that
her husband was damaged goods. She crept to an old family doctor and had
a fainting joy to find that she had escaped contamination.

"Though," said the doctor, "I doubt if it would be wise to have a child
of his."

"I won't!" she said, grimly.

She knew the ways of not having children. The practical Mr. Schwirtz had
seen to that. Strangely enough, he did not object to birth-control, even
though it was discussed by just the sort of people who wrote these
sensational realistic novels.

There were periods of reaction when she blamed herself for having become
so set in antipathy that she always looked for faults; saw as a fault
even the love for amusements which had once seemed a virtue in him.

She tried, wistfully and honestly, to be just. She reminded herself
constantly that she had enjoyed some of the parties with him--theater
and a late supper, with a couple just back from South America.

But--there were so many "buts"! Life was all one obliterating But.

Her worst moments were when she discovered that she had grown careless
about appearing before him in that drabbest, most ignoble of feminine
attire--a pair of old corsets; that she was falling into his own
indelicacies.

Such marionette tragedies mingled ever with the grander passion of
seeing life as a ruined thing; her birthright to aspiring cleanness sold
for a mess of quick-lunch pottage. And as she walked in a mist of agony,
a dumb, blind creature heroically distraught, she could scarce
distinguish between sordidness and the great betrayals, so chill and
thick was the fog about her.

She thought of suicide, often, but too slow and sullen was her protest
for the climax of suicide. And the common sense which she still had
urged her that some day, incredibly, there might again be hope. Oftener
she thought of a divorce. Of that she had begun to think even on the
second day of her married life. She suspected that it would not be hard
to get a divorce on statutory grounds. Whenever Mr. Schwirtz came back
from a trip he would visibly remove from his suit-case bunches of
letters in cheaply pretentious envelopes of pink and lavender. She
scorned to try to read them, but she fancied that they would prove
interesting to the judges.

Sec. 2

When Mr. Schwirtz was away Una was happy by contrast. Indeed she found a
more halcyon rest than