of confining one's self to a
coterie--especially one of such narrow views--her answer was rather
bewildering.

"But isn't Tom your best friend?" she asked.

I admitted that he was.

"And you always went there such a lot before we were married."

This, too, was undeniable. "At the same time," I replied, "I have other
friends. I'm fond of the Blackwoods and the Peterses, I'm not advocating
seeing less of them, but their point of view, if taken without any
antidote, is rather narrowing. We ought to see all kinds," I suggested,
with a fine restraint.

"You mean--more worldly people," she said with her disconcerting
directness.

"Not necessarily worldly," I struggled on. "People who know more of the
world--yes, who understand it better."

Maude sighed.

"I do try, Hugh,--I return their calls,--I do try to be nice to them.
But somehow I don't seem to get along with them easily--I'm not myself,
they make me shy. It's because I'm provincial."

"Nonsense!" I protested, "you're not a bit provincial." And it was true;
her dignity and self-possession redeemed her.

Nancy was not once mentioned. But I think she was in both our minds....

Since my marriage, too, I had begun to resent a little the attitude of
Tom and Susan and the Blackwoods of humorous yet affectionate tolerance
toward my professional activities and financial creed, though Maude
showed no disposition to take this seriously. I did suspect, however,
that they were more and more determined to rescue Maude from what they
would have termed a frivolous career; and on one of these occasions--so
exasperating in married life when a slight cause for pique tempts
husband or wife to try to ask myself whether this affair were only
a squall, something to be looked for once in a while on the seas of
matrimony, and weathered: or whether Maude had not, after all, been
right when she declared that I had made a mistake, and that we were
not fitted for one another? In this gloomy view endless years of
incompatibility stretched ahead; and for the first time I began
to rehearse with a certain cold detachment the chain of apparently
accidental events which had led up to my marriage: to consider the
gradual blindness that had come over my faculties; and finally to wonder
whether judgment ever entered into sexual selection. Would Maude have
relapsed into this senseless fit if she had realized how fortunate she
was? For I was prepared to give her what thousands of women longed