omentarily came near succeeding to convince herself that she could have
desired nothing more. "It's so sweet and clean and new--and all our own."

She succeeded, at any rate, in convincing Howard. In certain matters, he
was easily convinced.

"I thought you'd be pleased when you saw it, my dear," he said.

CHAPTER III

THE GREAT UNATTACHED

It was the poet Cowper who sang of domestic happiness as the only bliss
that has survived the Fall. One of the burning and unsolved questions of
to-day is,--will it survive the twentieth century? Will it survive rapid
transit and bridge and Woman's Rights, the modern novel and modern drama,
automobiles, flying machines, and intelligence offices; hotel, apartment,
and suburban life, or four homes, or none at all? Is it a weed that will
grow anywhere, in a crevice between two stones in the city? Or is it a
plant that requires tender care and the water of self-sacrifice? Above
all, is it desirable?

Our heroine, as may have been suspected, has an adaptable temperament.
Her natural position is upright, but like the reed, she can bend
gracefully, and yields only to spring back again blithely. Since this
chronicle regards her, we must try to look at existence through her eyes,
and those of some of her generation and her sex: we must give the four
years of her life in Rivington the approximate value which she herself
would have put upon it--which is a chapter. We must regard Rivington as a
kind of purgatory, not solely a place of departed spirits, but of those
which have not yet arrived; as one of the many temporary abodes of the
Great Unattached.

No philosophical writer has as yet made the attempt to define the change
--as profound as that of the tadpole to the frog--between the lover and
the husband. An author of ideals would not dare to proclaim that this
change is inevitable: some husbands--and some wives are fortunate enough
to escape it, but it is not unlikely to happen in our modern
civilization. Just when it occurred in Howard Spence it is difficult to
say, but we have got to consider him henceforth as a husband; one who
regards his home as a shipyard rather than the sanctuary of a goddess; as
a launching place, the ways of which are carefully greased, that he may
slide off to business every morning with as little friction as possible,
and return at night to rest undisturbed in a comfortable berth, to ponder
over the combat of the morrow.

It would be inspiring to su