ings you used to
do. In a joking sort of way, people have congratulated me about it, as
if it were some sort of triumph of mine. I haven't liked it, really.
But I never stopped to think out what it meant."

"What it does mean," he said, with a good deal of attention to his
cigarette, "is that I've fallen in love with you and married you and
that things are desirable to me now, because I am in love with you, that
weren't desirable before. And things that were desirable before, are
less so. I don't see anything terrible about that."

"There isn't," she said, "when--when you're in love with me."

He shot a frowning look at her and echoed her phrase interrogatively.
She nodded.

"Because you aren't in love with me all the time. And when you aren't,
you must see what I've done to you. You must--hate me for what I've done
to you. I remember the first day we ever talked--when you laughed at my
note-books. You talked about people who wore blinders and drew a cart
and followed a bundle of hay. That's what I've made you do."

His face flushed deep. He sprang to his feet and threw his cigarette
into the fire. "That's perfectly outrageous nonsense," he said. "I won't
listen to it."

"If it weren't true," she persisted, "you wouldn't be excited like that.
If I hadn't known it before, I'd have known it when I saw you with the
Lakes. You can give them something you can't give me, not with all the
love in the world. I never heard about them till to-night--not in a way
I'd remember. And there are other people--you spoke of some of them at
dinner--who are living here, that you've never mentioned to me before.
You've tried to sweep them all out of your life; to go to dances and the
opera and things with me. You did it because you loved me, but it wasn't
fair to either of us, Roddy. Because you can't love me all the time. I
don't believe a man--a real man--_can_ love a woman all the time. And if
she makes him hate her when he doesn't love her, he'll get so he hates
loving her."

"You're talking nonsense!" he said again roughly. He was pacing the room
by now. "Stark staring nonsense!"

Of course the reason it caught him like that was simply that it echoed
so uncannily the things that went through his own head sometimes in his
stolen hours of solitude--thoughts he had often tried, unavailingly, to
stamp out of existence.

"I'd like to know where you get that stuff. Is it from James Randolph?
He's dangerous, that fellow. Oh, he's i