ous how soon women
adapt themselves to new conditions if they are agreeable--she was in
a glow of wonder at her husband's goodness, at his love, which had
procured all this happiness for her.

"You have no idea," she said, "how thoughtful he is about
everything--and he makes so little of it all. I am to thank you, he
tells me always, for whatever pleases my taste in the house, and indeed
I think I should have known you had been here if he had not told me.
There are so many little touches that remind me of home. I am glad of
that, for it is the more likely to make you feel that it is your home
also."

She clung to this idea in the whirl of the new life. In the first days
she dwelt much on this theme; indeed it was hardly second in her talk
to her worship--I can call it nothing less--of her husband. She liked
to talk of Brandon and the dear life there and the dearer friends--this
much talk about it showed that it was another life, already of the past,
and beginning to be distant in the mind. My wife had a feeling that
Margaret, thus early, was conscious of a drift, of a widening space, and
was making an effort to pull the two parts of her life together, that
there should be no break, as one carried away to sea by a resistless
tide grasps the straining rope that still maintains his slender
connection with the shore.

But it was all so different: the luxurious house, the carriage at
call, the box at the opera, the social duties inevitable with her own
acquaintances and the friends of her husband. She spoke of this in
moments of confidence, and when she was tired, with a consciousness that
it was a different life, but in no tone of regret, and I fancy that the
French blood in her veins, which had so long run decorously in Puritan
channels, leaped at its return into new gayety. Years ago Margaret had
thought that she might some time be a missionary, at least that she
should like to devote her life to useful labors among the poor and the
unfortunate. If conscience ever reminded her of this, conscience was
quieted by the suggestion that now she was in a position to be more
liberal than she ever expected to be; that is, to give everything except
the essential thing--herself. Henderson liked a gay house, brightness,
dinners, entertainment, and that his wife should be seen and admired.
Proof of his love she found in all this, and she entered into it
with spirit, and an enjoyment increased by the thought that she was
lightening