you?"

"Yes," she murmured. She forced her rebellious lips to the laconic
assent. She drooped the lids over her rebellious eyes, lest he should
detect her wounded feelings and her resentment.

"I assumed so," said he, with a secret smile. "Well, if you wish to
please me, you'll give your time to practical things--things that'll
make you more interesting and make us both more comfortable. It was all
very well to dream, while you had little to do and small opportunity.
But now--Try to cut it out."

It is painful to an American girl of any class to find that she has to
earn her position as wife. The current theory, a tradition from an early
and woman-revering day, is that the girl has done her share and more
when she has consented to the suit of the ardent male and has intrusted
her priceless charms to his exclusive keeping. According to that same
theory, it is the husband who must earn his position--must continue to
earn it. He is a humble creature, honored by the presence of a wonderful
being, a cross between a queen and a goddess. He cannot do enough to
show his gratitude. Perhaps--but only perhaps--had Norman married
Josephine Burroughs, he might have assented, after a fashion, to this
idea of the relations of the man and the woman. No doubt, had he
remained under the spell of Dorothy's mystery and beauty, he would have
felt and acted the slave he had made of himself at the outset. But in
the circumstances he was looking at their prospective life together with
sane eyes. And so she had, in addition to all her other reasons for
heartache, a sense that she, the goddess-queen, the American woman, with
the birthright of dominion over the male, was being cheated, humbled,
degraded.

At first he saw that this sense of being wronged made it impossible for
her to do anything at all toward educating herself for her position. But
time brought about the change he had hoped for. A few weeks, and she
began to cheer up, almost in spite of herself. What was the use in
sulking or sighing or in self-pitying, when it brought only unhappiness
to oneself? The coarse and brutal male in the case was either unaware or
indifferent. There was no one and no place to fly to--unless she wished
to be much worse off than her darkest mood of self-pity represented her
to her sorrowing self. The housekeeper, Mrs. Lowell, was a "broken down
gentlewoman" who had been chastened by misfortune into a wholesome state
of practical good sense about the r