w husband the truth as to her affairs.

Mildred had thought that, than the family quarrels incident to settling
her father's estate, human nature could no lower descend. She was now
to be disillusioned. When a young man or a young woman blunders into a
poor marriage in trying to make a rich one, he or she is usually
withheld from immediate and frank expression by the timidity of youth.
Not so the elderly man or woman. As we grow older, no matter how
timidly conventional we are by nature, we become, through selfishness
or through indifference to the opinion of others or through impatience
of petty restraint, more and more outspoken. Old Presbury discovered
how he had tricked himself four days after the wedding. He and his
bride were at the Waldorf in New York, a-honeymooning.

The bride had never professed to be rich. She had simply continued in
her lifelong way, had simply acted rich. She well knew the gaudy
delusions her admirer was entertaining, and she saw to it that nothing
was said or done to disturb him. She inquired into his affairs, made
sure of the substantiality of the comparatively small income he
possessed, decided to accept him as her best available chance to escape
becoming a charge upon her anything but eager and generous relatives.
She awaited the explosion with serenity. She cared not a flip for
Presbury, who was a soft and silly old fool, full of antiquated
compliments and so drearily the inferior of Henry Gower, physically and
mentally, that even she could appreciate the difference, the descent.
She rather enjoyed the prospect of a combat with him, of the end of
dissimulating her contempt. She had thought out and had put in arsenal
ready for use a variety of sneers, jeers, and insults that suggested
themselves to her as she listened and simpered and responded while he
was courting.

Had the opportunity offered earlier than the fourth day she would have
seized it, but not until that fourth morning was she in just the right
mood. She had eaten too much dinner the night before, and had followed
it after two hours in a stuffy theater with an indigestible supper. He
liked the bedroom windows open at night; she liked them closed. After
she fell into a heavy sleep, he slipped out of bed and opened the
windows wide--to teach her by the night's happy experience that she was
entirely mistaken as to the harmfulness of fresh winter air. The
result was that she awakened with a frightful cold and a sp