arged opportunity for walking, riding, swimming, and trying her hand
at the fascinating new game of lawn tennis; and when they finally got
back to London (where they were to spend a fortnight while he ordered
HIS clothes) she no longer concealed the eagerness with which she
looked forward to sailing.

In London nothing interested her but the theatres and the shops; and
she found the theatres less exciting than the Paris cafes chantants
where, under the blossoming horse-chestnuts of the Champs Elysees, she
had had the novel experience of looking down from the restaurant
terrace on an audience of "cocottes," and having her husband interpret
to her as much of the songs as he thought suitable for bridal ears.

Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage. It
was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly as
all his friends treated their wives than to try to put into practice
the theories with which his untrammelled bachelorhood had dallied.
There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest
notion that she was not free; and he had long since discovered that
May's only use of the liberty she supposed herself to possess would be
to lay it on the altar of her wifely adoration. Her innate dignity
would always keep her from making the gift abjectly; and a day might
even come (as it once had) when she would find strength to take it
altogether back if she thought she were doing it for his own good. But
with a conception of marriage so uncomplicated and incurious as hers
such a crisis could be brought about only by something visibly
outrageous in his own conduct; and the fineness of her feeling for him
made that unthinkable. Whatever happened, he knew, she would always be
loyal, gallant and unresentful; and that pledged him to the practice of
the same virtues.

All this tended to draw him back into his old habits of mind. If her
simplicity had been the simplicity of pettiness he would have chafed
and rebelled; but since the lines of her character, though so few, were
on the same fine mould as her face, she became the tutelary divinity of
all his old traditions and reverences.

Such qualities were scarcely of the kind to enliven foreign travel,
though they made her so easy and pleasant a companion; but he saw at
once how they would fall into place in their proper setting. He had no
fear of being oppressed by them, for his artistic and intellectual life
would g