on the gate of life
from the vague without. She had opened the gate, caught a glimpse of the
shadowy land of the possible. And to do that is often to realize in a
flash the impossibility of one's individual fate. So many of us manage
to live ignorantly all our days and to call ourselves happy. Winifred
could never live quite ignorantly again.

To Eustace the interruption meant much less. So long as he had Winifred
he could not feel that any of his dreams hung altogether in tatters.
Sometimes, it is true, he contemplated the penny toys, and had a moment
of quaint, not unpleasant regret, half forming the thought, Why do we
ever trouble ourselves to prepare happiness for others, when happiness
is a word of a thousand meanings? As often as not, to do so is to set
a dinner of many courses and many wines before an unknown guest, who
proves to be vegetarian and teetotaler, after all.

"What shall I do with the toys?" he asked Winifred one day.

"The toys? Oh, give them to a children's hospital," she said, and her
voice had a harsh note in it.

"No," he answered, after a moment's reflection; "I'll keep them and play
with them myself; you know I love toys."

And on the following Sunday, when many callers came to Deanery Street,
they found him in the drawing-room, playing with a Noah's ark. Red,
green, violet, and azure elephants, antelopes, zebras, and pigs
processed along the carpet, guided by an orange-coloured Noah in a
purple top-hat, and a perfect parterre of sons and wives. The fixed
anxiety of their painted faces suggested that they were in apprehension
of the flood, but their rigid attitudes implied trust in the Unseen.

Winifred's face that day seemed changed to those who knew her best.
To one man, a soldier who had admired her greatly before her marriage,
and\who had seen no reason to change his opinion of her since, she was
more cordial than usual, and he went away curiously meditating on the
mystery of women.

"What has happened to Mrs. Lane?" he thought to himself as he walked
down Park Lane. "That last look of hers at me, when I was by the door,
going, was--yes, I'll swear it--Regent Street. And yet Winnie Lane is
the purest--I'm hanged if I can make out women! Anyhow, I'll go there
again. People say she and that fantastic ass she's married are devoted.
H'm!" He went to Pall Mall, and sat staring at nothing in his Club till
seven, deep in the mystery of the female sex.

And he went again to Deanery Street