her husband.

"Howard, do you really mean to say you've never heard of Reggie Farwell?
Lily was so lucky to get him--she says he wouldn't have done the house if
he hadn't been such a friend of hers. And he was coming to the tea this
afternoon--only something happened at the last minute, and he couldn't.
She was so disappointed. He built the Maitlands' house, and did over the
Cecil Graingers'. And he's going to do our house--some day."

"Why not right away?" asked Howard.

"Because I've made up my mind to be very, very reasonable," she replied.
"We're going to Quicksands for a while, first."

"To Quicksands!" he repeated. But in spite of himself he experienced a
feeling of relief that she had not demanded a town mansion on the spot.

Honora sprang to her feet.

"Get up, Howard," she cried, "remember that we're going out for
dinner-and you'll never be ready."

"Hold on," he protested, "I don't know about this Quicksands proposition.
Let's talk it over a little more--"

"We'll talk it over another time," she replied. "But--remember my
ultimatum. And I am only taking you there for your own good."

"For my own good!"

"Yes. To get you out of a rut. To keep you from becoming commonplace and
obscure and--and everything you promised not to be when you married me,"
she retorted from the doorway, her eyes still alight with that disturbing
and tantalizing fire. "It is my last desperate effort as a wife to save
you from baldness, obesity, and nonentity." Wherewith she disappeared
into her room and closed the door.

We read of earthquakes in the tropics and at the ends of the earth with
commiseration, it is true, yet with the fond belief that the ground on
which we have built is so firm that our own 'lares' and 'penates' are in
no danger of being shaken down. And in the same spirit we learn of other
people's domestic cataclysms. Howard Spence had had only a slight shock,
but it frightened him and destroyed his sense of immunity. And during the
week that followed he lacked the moral courage either to discuss the
subject of Quicksands thoroughly or to let it alone: to put down his foot
like a Turk or accede like a Crichton.

Either course might have saved him. One trouble with the unfortunate man
was that he realized but dimly the gravity of the crisis. He had laboured
under the delusion that matrimonial conditions were still what they had
been in the Eighteenth Century--although it is doubtful whether he had
ever though