y flies in
France? For what on earth has Jack to do with crucial points and July
mornings?"

"Why, I suppose, I only made bold to introduce his name for the sake of
an illustration, Rudolph. For the last person in the world to realize,
precisely, why any woman did anything is invariably the woman who did
it.... Yet there comes in every married woman's existence that time when
she realizes, suddenly, that her husband has a past which might be
taken as, in itself, a complete and rounded life--as a life which had
run the gamut of all ordinary human passions, and had become familiar
with all ordinary human passions a dishearteningly long while before she
ever came into that life. A woman never realizes that of her lover,
somehow. But to know that your husband, the father of your child, has
lived for other women a life in which you had no part, and never can
have part!--she realizes that, at one time or another, and--and it
sickens her." Mrs. Pendomer smiled as she echoed his phrase, but her
eyes were not mirthful.

"Ah, she hungers for those dead years, Rudolph, and, though you devote
your whole remaining life to her, nothing can ever make up for them; and
she always hates those shadowy women who have stolen them from her. A
woman never, at heart, forgives the other women who have loved her
husband, even though she cease to care for him herself. For she
remembers--ah, you men forget so easily, Rudolph! God had not invented
memory when he created Adam; it was kept for the woman."

Then ensued a pause, during which Rudolph Musgrave smiled down upon her,
irresolutely; for he abhorred "a scene," as his vernacular phrased it,
and to him Clarice's present manner bordered upon both the scenic and
the incomprehensible.

"Ah!--you women!" he temporized.

There was a glance from eyes whose luster time and irregular living had
conspired to dim.

"Ah!--you men!" Mrs. Pendomer retorted. "And there we have the tragedy
of life in a nutshell!"

Silence lasted for a while. The colonel was finding this matutinal talk
discomfortably opulent in pauses.

"Rudolph, and has it never occurred to you that in marrying Patricia you
swindled her?"

And naturally his eyebrows lifted.

"Because a woman wants love."

"Well, well! and don't I love Patricia?"

"I dare say that you think you do. Only you have played at loving so
long you are really unable to love anybody as a girl has every right to
be loved in her twenties. Yes, Rudolph, y