nce upon which the relation rests, and
though interference may patch up livable compromises, the bloom of love
and the joy of life are not in them. Edith knew that if she could not
win her own battle, no human aid could win it for her.

And it was all the more difficult because it was vague and indefinite,
as the greater part of domestic tragedies are. For the most part life
goes on with external smoothness, and the public always professes
surprise when some accident, a suit at law, a sudden death, a contested
will, a slip from apparent integrity, or family greed or feminine
revenge, turns the light of publicity upon a household, to find how
hollow the life has been; in the light of forgotten letters, revealing
check-books, servants' gossip, and long-established habits of aversion
or forbearance, how much sordidness and meanness!

Was not everything going on as usual in the Delancy house and in the
little world of which it was a part? If there had been any open neglect
or jealousy, any quarrel or rupture, or any scene, these could be
described. These would have an interest to the biographer and perhaps to
the public. But at this period there was nothing of this sort to
tell. There were no scenes. There were no protests or remonstrances or
accusations, nor to the world was there any change in the daily life of
these two.

It was more pitiful even than that. Here was a woman who had set her
heart in all the passionate love of a pure ideal, and day by day she
felt that the world, the frivolous world, with its low and selfish
aims, was too strong for her, and that the stream was wrecking her
life because it was bearing Jack away from her. What could one woman
do against the accepted demoralizations of her social life? To go with
them, not to care, to accept Jack's idle, good-natured, easy philosophy
of life and conduct, would not that have insured a peaceful life? Why
shouldn't she conform and float, and not mind?

To be sure, a wise woman, who has been blessed or cursed with a long
experience of life, would have known that such a course could not
forever, or for long, secure happiness, and that a man's love ultimately
must rest upon a profound respect for his wife and a belief in her
nobility. Perhaps Edith did not reason in this way. Probably it was her
instinct for what was pure and true-showing, indeed, the quality of her
love-that guided her.

To Jack's friends he was much the same as usual. He simply went on in