could put on his wife's tombstone would
be, '_She was interestin' to live with_.' So I tell you, Eleanor, if
you want to hold that boy, _make him laugh_!" She was so much in
earnest that for a few minutes she actually stopped talking!

Eleanor could not make Maurice laugh--she never made anybody laugh! But
for a while she did "hold him"--because he was a gallant youngster,
making the best of his bargain. That he had begun to know it was a bad
bargain did not lessen his regret for his wife's childlessness, which he
knew made her unhappy, nor his pity for her physical forlornness--which
he blamed largely on himself: "She almost died that night on the
mountain, to save my life!"

But he had ceased to be touched by her reiterated longing for children;
he was even a little bored by it. And he was very much bored by her
reproaches, her faint tempers and their following ardors of repentant
love--bitternesses, and cloying sweetnesses! Yet, in spite of these
things, the boarding-house marriage survived the lengthening of the
fifty-four minutes of ecstasy into three years. But it might not have
survived its own third winter had it not been that Maurice's
unfaithfulness enforced his faithfulness. For by spring that squabble
about lead pencils, which had turned his careless steps toward the
bridge, had turned his life so far from Eleanor's that he had been
untrue to her.

He had not meant to be untrue; nothing had been farther from his mind or
purpose. But there came a bitter Sunday afternoon in March ...

Eleanor, saying he did not "understand her," cried about
something--afterward Maurice was not sure just what--perhaps it was a
question from one of the other boarders about the early 'eighties, and
she felt herself insulted; "As if I could remember!" she told Maurice;
but whatever it was, he had tried to comfort her by joking about it.
Then she had reproached him for his unkindness--to most crying wives a
joke is unkind. Then she had said that he was tired of her! At which he
took refuge in silence--and she cried out that he acknowledged it!

"You can't deny it! You're tired of me because I'm older than you!"

And he said, between his teeth, "If you were old enough to have any
sense, I wouldn't be tired of you."

She gave a cry; then stood, the back of her hand against her lips, her
eyes wide with terror.

Maurice threw down a book he had been trying to read, got up, plunged
into his overcoat, pulled his hat down over h