you," he resumed in a lighter tone of
voice. "But"--grimly--"not even you, when you're my wife, shall defy
me with impunity."

Nan drew herself out of his arms.

"Well, I'm not your wife yet," she said, trying to laugh away the
queer, unexpected tensity of the moment. "Only a very hard-working
young woman, who has a concerto to play to you."

He frowned a little.

"There's no need for you to work hard. I'd rather you didn't. I want
you just to enjoy life--have a good time--and keep your music as a
relaxation."

Her face clouded over.

"Oh, Roger, you don't understand! I _must_ do it. I couldn't live
without it. It fills my life."

His expression softened. He reached out his arm again and drew her
back to his side, but this time with a strange, unwonted tenderness.

"I suppose it does," he conceded. "But some day, darling, after we're
married, I hope there'll be something--someone--else to fill your life.
And when that time comes,--why, the music will take second place."

Nan flushed scarlet and wriggled irritably in his embrace.

"Oh, Roger, do try to understand! As if . . . having a child . . .
would make any difference. A baby's a baby, and music's music--the one
can't take the place of the other."

Roger looked a trifle taken aback. He held old-fashioned views and
rather thought that all women regarded motherhood as a duty and
privilege of existence. And, inside himself, he had never doubted that
if this great happiness were ever granted to Nan, she would lose all
those funny, unaccountable ways of hers--which alternately bewildered
and annoyed him--and turn into a nice, normal woman like ninety-nine
per cent. of the other women of his somewhat limited acquaintance.

Man has an odd trick of falling in love with the last kind of woman you
would expect him to, the very antithesis of the ideal he has previously
formulated to himself, and then of expecting her, after matrimony,
suddenly to change her whole individuality--the very individuality
which attracted him in the first instance--and conform to his
preconceived notions of what a wife ought to he.

It is illogical, of course, with that gloriously pig-headed
illogicalness not infrequently to be found in the supposedly logical
sex, and it would be laughable were it not that it so often ends in
tragedy.

So that Roger was quite genuinely dumbfounded at Nan's heterodox
pronouncement on the relative values of music and babies.

A baby was