right and beautiful to spend one's own hard-collected
savings on being happy.

"Think how much nicer we shall be when we come back," she said to
Mrs. Arbuthnot, encouraging that pale lady.

No, Mrs. Wilkins had no doubts, but she had fears; and March was
for her too an anxious month, with the unconscious Mr. Wilkins coming
back daily to his dinner and eating his fish in the silence of imagined
security.

Also things happened so awkwardly. It really is astonishing, how
awkwardly they happen. Mrs. Wilkins, who was very careful all this
month to give Mellersh only the food he liked, buying it and hovering
over its cooking with a zeal more than common, succeeded so well the
Mellersh was pleased; definitely pleased; so much pleased that he began
to think that he might, after all, have married the right wife instead
of, as he had frequently suspected, the wrong one. The result was that
on the third Sunday in the month--Mrs. Wilkins had made up her
trembling mind that on the fourth Sunday, there being five in that
March and it being on the fifth of them that she and Mrs. Arbuthnot
were to start, she would tell Mellersh of her invitation--on the third
Sunday, then, after a very well-cooked lunch in which the Yorkshire
pudding had melted in his mouth and the apricot tart had been so
perfect that he ate it all, Mellersh, smoking his cigar by the brightly
burning fire the while hail gusts banged on the window, said "I am
thinking of taking you to Italy for Easter." And paused for her
astounded and grateful ecstasy.

None came. The silence in the room, except for the hail hitting
the windows and the gay roar of the fire, was complete. Mrs. Wilkins
could not speak. She was dumbfounded. The next Sunday was the day she
had meant to break her news to him, and she had not yet even prepared
the form of words in which she would break it.

Mr. Wilkins, who had not been abroad since before the war, and
was noticing with increasing disgust, as week followed week of wind and
rain, the peculiar persistent vileness of the weather, and slowly
conceived a desire to get away from England for Easter. He was doing
very well in his business. He could afford a trip. Switzerland was
useless in April. There was a familiar sound about Easter in Italy.
To Italy he would go; and as it would cause comment if he did not take
his wife, take her he must--besides, she would be useful; a second
person was always useful in a country whose langua