woman in mourning, whose clever talk was so absorbing to Maurice that
sometimes he didn't hear his wife speaking to him! Yes; Eleanor tried.
Yet, in less than a month Maurice found himself beside a boarder of his
own sex, instead of Mrs. Davis, and saw that the school-teacher was too
far down the table for jokes. When he asked why their seats had been
changed, Eleanor said she had felt a draught--which caused the widow to
smile, and write on a piece of paper an arithmetical statement:
"Selfishness + vanity - humor = jealousy." She handed it to the teacher,
who laughed and shrugged her shoulders:

"But she's awfully in love with him," she conceded, under her breath.

The older woman shook her head: "No, my dear; she isn't. No jealous
woman knows the meaning of love."

But Eleanor did not see Miss Moore's contemptuous smile, or Mrs. Davis's
grave glance. One of the pitiful things about jealous people is that
they don't know how amusing--or else boring--or else irritating--they
are to an observant and entirely unsympathetic world! Eleanor had no
idea that the whole tableful of people knew she was jealous, and found
her ridiculous. She only knew that Maurice seemed to like them--which
meant that her society "wasn't enough for him "! So she tried to make it
enough for him. At dinner she talked to him so animatedly (and so
personally) that no one else could get a word in edgewise. Dinner over,
she was uneasy until she had dragged her eager-eyed young husband up to
the desert island of their third-floor front--a dingy room, with a
black-marble mantelpiece, and a worn and frowzy carpet. There were some
steel engravings, dim under their old glasses, on the wall,--Evangeline,
and Lincoln's Cabinet, and Daniel Webster in a rumpled shirt and a long
swallowtail;--all of which Eleanor's looking-glass and the mirrored
doors of a black-walnut wardrobe, reflected in multiplying dullness.

Maurice's charming good nature in that first boarding winter never
failed. Eleanor's silences--which he had long since discovered were
merely empty, not mysterious--were at least no tax on his patience; so
he never once called her "silly." He did, occasionally, feel a faint
uneasiness lest people might think she was older than he--which was, of
course, the beginning of self-consciousness as to what he had done in
marrying her. But he loved her. He still loved her. "She isn't very
well," he used to defend her to Mrs. Newbolt; "she nearly killed
herse