reason for doing so.

"You seem not to have cared for what I said this afternoon. Did I put
the case badly?"

"No--you put it very well."

"Then what did you mean by saying that you would rather not have me go
on with it?"

She glanced at him nervously, her ignorance of his intention deepening
her sense of helplessness.

"I don't think I care to hear such things discussed in public."

"I don't understand you," he exclaimed. Again the feeling that his
surprise was genuine gave an air of obliquity to her own attitude. She
was not sure that she understood herself.

"Won't you explain?" he said with a tinge of impatience. Her eyes
wandered about the familiar drawing-room which had been the scene of so
many of their evening confidences. The shaded lamps, the quiet-colored
walls hung with mezzotints, the pale spring flowers scattered here and
there in Venice glasses and bowls of old Sevres, recalled, she hardly
knew why, the apartment in which the evenings of her first marriage had
been passed--a wilderness of rosewood and upholstery, with a picture of
a Roman peasant above the mantel-piece, and a Greek slave in "statuary
marble" between the folding-doors of the back drawing-room. It was a
room with which she had never been able to establish any closer relation
than that between a traveller and a railway station; and now, as
she looked about at the surroundings which stood for her deepest
affinities--the room for which she had left that other room--she was
startled by the same sense of strangeness and unfamiliarity. The prints,
the flowers, the subdued tones of the old porcelains, seemed to typify a
superficial refinement that had no relation to the deeper significances
of life.

Suddenly she heard her husband repeating his question.

"I don't know that I can explain," she faltered.

He drew his arm-chair forward so that he faced her across the hearth.
The light of a reading-lamp fell on his finely drawn face, which had
a kind of surface-sensitiveness akin to the surface-refinement of its
setting.

"Is it that you no longer believe in our ideas?" he asked.

"In our ideas--?"

"The ideas I am trying to teach. The ideas you and I are supposed to
stand for." He paused a moment. "The ideas on which our marriage was
founded."

The blood rushed to her face. He had his reasons, then--she was sure now
that he had his reasons! In the ten years of their marriage, how
often had either of them stopped to consider the i