uit of a spring chicken by a hawk) speak of with
sentiment as "a triumph of love over differences." Even in the first
days of their engagement, there could be found no better reason for
their marriage than the meeting of Cyrus's stubborn propensity to have
his way with the terror of imaginary spinsterhood which had seized
Belinda in a temporary lapse of suitors. Having married, they
immediately proceeded, as if by mutual consent, to make the worst of it.
She, poor fluttering dove-like creature, had lost hope at the first
rebuff, and had let go all the harmless little sentiments that had
sweetened her life; while he, having married a dove by choice and
because of her doveliness, had never forgiven her that she did not
develop into a brisk, cackling hen of the barnyard. As usually happens
in the cases where "love triumphs over differences," he had come at last
to hate her for the very qualities which had first caught his fancy. His
ideal woman (though he was perfectly unconscious that she existed) was a
managing thrifty soul, in a starched calico dress, with a natural
capacity for driving a bargain; and Life, with grim humour, had rewarded
this respectable preference by bestowing upon him feeble and insipid
Belinda, who spent sleepless nights trying to add three and five
together, but who could never, to save her soul, remember to put down
the household expenses in the petty cash book. It was a case, he
sometimes told himself, of a man, who had resisted temptation all his
life, being punished for one instant's folly more harshly than if he
were a practised libertine. No libertine, indeed, could have got himself
into such a scrape, for none would have surrendered so completely to a
single manifestation of the primal force. To play the fool once, he
reflected bitterly, when his brief intoxication was over, is after all
more costly than to play it habitually. Had he pursued a different pair
of violet eyes every evening, he would never have ended by embracing the
phantom that was Belinda.

But it was more than thirty years since Cyrus had taken the trouble to
turn his unhappiness into philosophy--for, aided by time, he had become
reconciled to his wife as a man becomes reconciled to a physical
infirmity. Except for that one eventful hour in April, women had stood
for so little in his existence, that he had never stopped to wonder if
his domestic relations might have been pleasanter had he gone about the
business of selection