very perfection of her wifehood exasperating. Our relationship
would, I thought, have been more endurable if we had quarrelled. And yet
we had grown as far apart, in that big house, as though we had been
separated by a continent; I lived in my apartments, she in hers; she
consulted me about dinner parties and invitations; for, since we had
moved to Grant Avenue, we entertained and went out more than before. It
seemed as though she were making every effort consistent with her
integrity and self-respect to please me. Outwardly she conformed to the
mould; but I had long been aware that inwardly a person had developed. It
had not been a spontaneous development, but one in resistance to
pressure; and was probably all the stronger for that reason. At times her
will revealed itself in astonishing and unexpected flashes, as when once
she announced that she was going to change Matthew's school.

"He's old enough to go to boarding-school," I said. "I'll look up a place
for him."

"I don't wish him to go to boarding-school yet, Hugh," she said quietly.

"But that's just what he needs," I objected. "He ought to have the
rubbing-up against other boys that boarding-school will give him. Matthew
is timid, he should have learned to take care of himself. And he will
make friendships that will help him in a larger school."

"I don't intend to send him," Maude said.

"But if I think it wise?"

"You ought to have begun to consider such things many years ago. You have
always been too--busy to think of the children. You have left them to me.
I am doing the best I can with them."

"But a man should have something to say about boys. He understands them."

"You should have thought of that before."

"They haven't been old enough."

"If you had taken your share of responsibility for them, I would listen
to you."

"Maude!" I exclaimed reproachfully.

"No, Hugh," she went on, "you have been too busy making money. You have
left them to me. It is my task to see that the money they are to inherit
doesn't ruin them."

"You talk as though it were a great fortune," I said.

But I did not press the matter. I had a presentiment that to press it
might lead to unpleasant results.

It was this sense of not being free, of having gained everything but
freedom that was at times galling in the extreme: this sense of living
with a woman for whom I had long ceased to care, a woman with a baffling
will concealed beneath an unruffled and serene exte