everyone's marriage is more or less like ours," Margaret mused
miserably. "Perhaps there's no such thing as a happy marriage."

Almost all the women that she knew admitted unhappiness of one sort or
another, and discussed their domestic troubles freely. Margaret had
never sunk to that; it would not even have been a relief to a nature as
self-sufficient and as cold as hers. But for years she had felt that
her marriage tie was an irksome and distasteful bond, and only that
afternoon she had been stung by the bitter fact that the state of
affairs between her husband and herself was no secret from their world.
A certain audacious newspaper had boldly hinted that there would soon
be a sensational separation in the Kirby household, whose beautiful
mistress would undoubtedly follow her first unhappy marital experience
with another--and, it was to be hoped, a more fortunate--marriage.

Margaret had laughed when the article was shown her, with the easy
flippancy that is the stock in trade of her type of society woman; but
the arrow had reached her very soul, nevertheless.

So it had come to that, had it? She and John had failed! They were to
be dragged through the publicity, the humiliations, that precede the
sundering of what God has joined together. They had drifted, as so many
hundreds and thousands of men and women drift, from the warm, glorious
companionship of the honeymoon, to quarrels, to truces, to discussion,
to a recognition of their utter difference in point of view, and to
this final independent, cool adjustment, that left their lives as
utterly separated as if they had never met.

Yet she had done only what all the women she knew had done, Margaret
reminded herself in self-justification. She had done it a little more
brilliantly, perhaps; she had spent more money, worn handsomer jewels
and gowns; she had succeeded in idling away her life in that utter
leisure that was the ideal of them all, whether they were quite able to
achieve it or not. Some women had to order their dinners, had
occasionally to go about in hired vehicles, had to consider the cost of
hats and gowns; but Margaret, the envied, had her own carriage and
motor-car, her capable housekeeper, her yearly trip to Paris for
uncounted frocks and hats.

All the women she knew were useless, boasting rather of what they did
not have to do than of what they did, and Margaret was more
successfully useless than the others. But wasn't that the lot of a
woman