t in the moonlight. My
window comes down to the floor, and I can look at the sky all night."

She shot round the house to the kitchen door, and Dr. Archie watched her
disappear with a sigh. He thought of the hard, mean, frizzy little woman
who kept his house for him; once the belle of a Michigan town, now dry
and withered up at thirty. "If I had a daughter like Thea to watch," he
reflected, "I wouldn't mind anything. I wonder if all of my life's going
to be a mistake just because I made a big one then? Hardly seems fair."

Howard Archie was "respected" rather than popular in Moonstone. Everyone
recognized that he was a good physician, and a progressive Western town
likes to be able to point to a handsome, well-set-up, well-dressed man
among its citizens. But a great many people thought Archie "distant,"
and they were right. He had the uneasy manner of a man who is not among
his own kind, and who has not seen enough of the world to feel that all
people are in some sense his own kind. He knew that every one was
curious about his wife, that she played a sort of character part in
Moonstone, and that people made fun of her, not very delicately. Her own
friends--most of them women who were distasteful to Archie--liked to ask
her to contribute to church charities, just to see how mean she could
be. The little, lop-sided cake at the church supper, the cheapest
pincushion, the skimpiest apron at the bazaar, were always Mrs. Archie's
contribution.

All this hurt the doctor's pride. But if there was one thing he had
learned, it was that there was no changing Belle's nature. He had
married a mean woman; and he must accept the consequences. Even in
Colorado he would have had no pretext for divorce, and, to do him
justice, he had never thought of such a thing. The tenets of the
Presbyterian Church in which he had grown up, though he had long ceased
to believe in them, still influenced his conduct and his conception of
propriety. To him there was something vulgar about divorce. A divorced
man was a disgraced man; at least, he had exhibited his hurt, and made
it a matter for common gossip. Respectability was so necessary to Archie
that he was willing to pay a high price for it. As long as he could keep
up a decent exterior, he could manage to get on; and if he could have
concealed his wife's littleness from all his friends, he would scarcely
have complained. He was more afraid of pity than he was of any
unhappiness. Had there been an