er
lingered in a haunting sense of disappointment with herself; she had
failed Franklin in deeper, more subtle ways than in the mere shattering
of his hopes.

Althea had never been a good business woman; her affairs were taken care
of for her in Boston by wise and careful cousins; but she found that
Gerald, in spite of his air of irresponsibility, was a very good
business man, and it was he who pointed out to her, with cheerful and
affectionate frankness, that her fortune was not as large as she, with
her heretofore unexacting demands on it, had imagined. It was only when
Althea took for granted that it could suffice for much larger, new
demands, that Gerald pointed out the facts of limitation; to himself, he
made this clear and sweet, the facts were amply sufficient; there was
more than enough for his sober wants. But Althea, sitting over the
papers with him in the library, and looking rather vague and wistful,
realised that if Gerald's wants were to be the chief consideration many
of her own must, indeed, go unsatisfied. Gerald evidently took it
perfectly for granted that her wants would be his. Looking up at the
flat and faded portraits of bygone Digbys, while this last one, his
charming eyes lifted so brightly and so intelligently upon her, made
things clear, looking up, over his head, at these ancestors of her
affianced, Althea saw in their aspect of happy composure that they, too,
had always taken it for granted that their wives' wants were just
that--just their own wants. She couldn't--not at first--lucidly
articulate to herself any marked divergence between her wants and
Gerald's; she, too, wanted to see Merriston House restored and made
again into a home for Digbys; but Merriston House had been seen by her
as a means, not as an end. She had seen it as a centre to a larger life;
he saw it as a boundary beyond which they could not care to stray. After
the golden bliss of the first days of her new life there, as Gerald's
promised wife, there came for her a pause of rather perplexed reaction
in this sense of limits, this sense of being placed in a position that
she must keep, this strange sense of slow but sure metamorphosis into
one of a succession of Mrs. Digbys whose wants were their husbands'.

'Yes, yes, I quite see, dear,' she said at intervals, while Gerald
explained to her what it cost to keep up even such a small place. 'What
a pity that those stocks of mine you were telling me about don't yield
more. It