e that these privileges of weakness are humbug, that
they're not in nature. I mean to teach you that a man is a better
animal--"

He suddenly withdrew his hands from her with a sharp exclamation.
Milly's teeth were pearly white and rather small, but they were pointed,
and they had met in the flesh of the right hand which rested so firmly
on her shoulder. He fell back and put his hand to his mouth. A boat-hook
lay within her reach, and her end of the canoe had drifted near enough
to the river-bank for her to be able to catch hold with the hook and to
pull it farther in. Braced to the uttermost by rage and fear, she
bounded to her feet without upsetting the canoe. It lurched violently,
but righted itself, swinging out once more into the stream. Maxwell
looked up and saw her standing on the river-bank above him. She did not
stay to parley, but with lifted skirt hurried up the steep meadow,
through the sun-flecked shadows of the elm-trees, towards the path. When
she was half-way up a harsh, sardonic laugh sounded behind her, and
instinctively she looked back. Maxwell held up his wounded hand:

"Primitive woman at last, Mildred!" he shouted. "Don't apologize, I
sha'n't."

CHAPTER XVII

Ian only came home just in time to scramble into his evening dress-suit
for a dinner at the Fletchers'. He needed not to fear delay either from
that shirt-button at the back, refractory or on the last thread, or from
any other and more insidious trap for the hurrying male. Milly looked
after him in a way which, if the makers of traditions concerning wives
were not up to their necks in falsehood, must have inspired devotion in
the heart of any husband alive. She had already observed that he had
been allowed to lose most of the pocket-handkerchiefs she had marked for
him in linen thread. That trifles such as this should cause bitterness
will seem as absurd to sensible persons as it would to be told that our
lives are made up of mere to-morrows--if Shakespeare had not happened to
put that in his own memorable way. For it takes a vast deal of
imagination to embrace the ordinary facts of life and human nature. But
even the most sensible will understand that it was annoying for Milly
regularly to find her own and the family purse reduced to a state that
demanded rigid economy. The Invader, stirring in that limbo where she
lay, might have answered that rigid economy was Milly's forte and real
delight, and that it was well she should have