upidly clever?" I
finally asked.

"When I suppose you'd rather see me cleverly stupid?" he found the
heart to suggest.

"But that woman, to me, always looked like a frog," I protested, doing
my best to duplicate his pose of impersonality.

"Well, she doesn't make love like a frog," he retorted with his first
betraying touch of anger. I turned to the window, to the end that my
Eliza-Crossing-the-Ice look wouldn't be entirely at his mercy. A
belated March blizzard was slapping at the panes and cuffing the
house-corners. At the end of a long winter, I knew, tempers were apt
to be short. But this was much more than a matter of barometers. The
man I'd wanted to live with like a second "Suzanne de Sirmont" in
Daudet's _Happiness_ had not only cut me to the quick but was rubbing
salt in the wound. He had said what he did with deliberate intent to
hurt me, for it was only too obvious that he was tired of being on the
defensive. And it did hurt. It couldn't help hurting. For the man,
after all, was my husband. He was the husband to whom I'd given up the
best part of my life, the two-legged basket into which I'd packed all
my eggs of allegiance. And now he was scrambling that precious
collection for a cheap omelette of amorous adventure. He was my
husband, I kept reminding myself. But that didn't cover the entire
case. No husband whose heart is right stands holding another woman's
shoulder and tries to read her shoe-numbers through her ardently
upturned eyes. It shows the wind is not blowing right in the home
circle. It shows a rent in the dyke, a flaw in the blade, a breach in
the fortress-wall of faith. For marriage, to the wife who is a mother
as well, impresses me as rather like the spliced arrow of the
Esquimos: it is cemented together with blood. It is a solemn matter.
And for the sake of _mutter-schutz_, if for nothing else, it must be
kept that way.

There was a time, I suppose, when the thought of such a thing would
have taken my breath away, would have chilled me to the bone. But I'd
been through my refining fires, in that respect, and you can't burn
the prairie over twice in the same season. I tried to tell myself it
was the setting, and not the essential fact, that seemed so odious. I
did my best to believe it wasn't so much that Duncan Argyll McKail had
stooped to make advances to this bandy-legged she-teacher whom I'd so
charitably housed at Casa Grande since the beginning of the year--for
I'd long since learn