rved the enormous difference between a man and a woman who
meet occasionally and the same people chained together interminably.
Quail is a delicacy for invalids and gourmets, but notoriously
intolerable as a steady diet. On the other hand, bread is forever
good. One never tires of bread. And a lucky marriage is as perennially
refreshing as bread and butter. The maddening thing about marriage is
what makes other lotteries irresistible: after all, capital prizes do
exist, and some people get them.

Mamise had seen happy mates, rich and poor. In her lonelier hours she
coveted their dual blessedness, enriched with joys and griefs shared
in plenty and in privation.

Mamise liked Davidge better than she had ever liked any other man.
She supposed she loved him. Sometimes she longed for him with a kind
of ferocity. Then she was afraid of him, of what he would be like as a
husband, of what she would be like as a wife.

Mamise was in an absolute chaos of mind, afraid of everything and
everybody, from the weather to wedlock. She had been lured into an
office by the fascinating advertisements of freedom, a career,
achievement, doing-your-bit and other catchwords. She had found that
business has its boredoms no less than the prison walls of home,
commerce its treadmills and its oakum-picking no less than the jail.
The cozy little cottage and the pleasant chores of solitude began to
nag her soul.

The destruction of the good ship _Clara_ had dealt her a heavier blow
than she at first realized, for the mind suffers from obscure internal
injuries as the body does after a great shock. She understood what
bitter tragedies threaten the business man no less than the monarch,
the warrior, the poet, and the lover, though there has not been many
an AEschylos or Euripides or Dante to make poetry of the Prometheus
chained to the rocks of trade with the vulture pay-roll gnawing at his
profits; the OEdipos in the factory who sees everything gone horribly
awry; or the slow pilgrim through the business hell with all the
infernal variations of bankruptcy, strikes, panics, and competition.

The blowing up of the _Clara_ had revealed the pitiful truth that men
may toil like swarming bees upon a painful and costly structure, only
to see it all annulled at once by a careless or a malicious stranger.
The _Clara_ served as a warning that the ship _Mamise_ now on the
stocks and growing ever so slowly might be never finished, or
destroyed as soon as d