ng up wedding cake--let me talk and act as high
priest."

She shook her head. "You promised, and you've been true-blue--don't
spoil it. Besides, it can do no good."

"I want to ask a question," he insisted. "I'm not going to break faith
with you or take advantage of knowing what you told me. I shall always
try to appreciate the honour done me, no matter if I am unworthy. I
want to ask a question in as impersonal a way as if I wrote in to a
woman's column." He tried to laugh.

"Ask away." Mary sat down in the nearest chair, the broken cardboard
box at her feet.

"Why is it that a man can honestly be in love with the woman he
marries and yet in an amazingly short time find himself playing the
cad in feeling disappointed, discontented, utterly lacking affection?
It's a ghastly happening. Why is it he saw no handwriting on the wall?
I am not stupid, Mary, neither am I given to inconstancy--I've had to
struggle too much not to have my mind made up once and for all time.
Why didn't I see through this veneer of a good time that these
Gorgeous Girls manage to have painted over their real selves? Why did
I never suspect? And what is a man to do when he discovers the
disillusionment? You see it all, there's no sense in not admitting
it--why do I find myself ill at ease, now tense, now irritable over
trifles, now sulky, despondent--as plainly sulky and despondent as a
wild animal successfully caged and labelled, which must perforce stay
put yet which will not afford its spectators the satisfaction of
walking wistfully from cage corner to cage corner and yowling in
unanswered anguish!"

"Is it as bad as that?" she asked, softly.

He nodded as he continued: "I sometimes feel the way the monkish
fraternity did at Oxford when they claimed 'they banished God and
admitted women.' I want a man-made world, womanless, without a single
trace of romance or a good time. Not right, is it? Sometimes I think
I'll crack under the pretense, go raving mad and scream out the whole
miserable sham under which I live--and every time I indulge myself in
such a reverie I find myself writing Beatrice an extra check and going
with her to this thing or that, steel-hammer pulses beating at my
forehead and a languor about even the attempt at breathing."

Mary would have spoken but he rushed ahead: "I like this fire, this
debris. Most people would curse at it--it's real and rather common,
sort of plain boiled-dinner variety. It gives me an excuse to t