"I wouldn't. Think what an ass she'd be not to realize it before she married him.

He's the sort whose idea of honoring and respecting a woman would be never to
give her any excitement. With the best intentions, he was deep in the dark ages."

"What was his attitude toward you?"

"I'm coming to that. As I told you--or did I tell you?--he was mighty good-looking:
big brown honest eyes and one of those smiles that guarantee the heart behind it is
twenty-karat gold. Being young and credulous, I thought he had some discretion,
so I kissed him fervently one night when we were riding around after a dance at the
Homestead at Hot Springs. It had been a wonderful week, I remember--with the
most luscious trees spread like green lather, sort of, all over the valley and a mist
rising out of them on October mornings like bonfires lit to turn them brown--"

"How about your friend with the ideals?" interrupted Anthony.

"It seems that when he kissed me he began to think that perhaps he could get away
with a little more, that I needn't be 'respected' like this Beatrice Fairfax glad-girl of
his imagination."

"What'd he do?"

"Not much. I pushed him off a sixteen-foot embankment before he was well
started."

"Hurt him?" inquired Anthony with a laugh.

"Broke his arm and sprained his ankle. He told the story all over Hot Springs, and
when his arm healed a man named Barley who liked me fought him and broke it
over again. Oh, it was all an awful mess. He threatened to sue Barley, and Barley--
he was from Georgia--was seen buying a gun in town. But before that mama had
dragged me North again, much against my will, so I never did find out all that
happened--though I saw Barley once in the Vanderbilt lobby."

Anthony laughed long and loud.

"What a career! I suppose I ought to be furious because you've kissed so many men.
I'm not, though."

At this she sat up in bed.

"It's funny, but I'm so sure that those kisses left no mark on me--no taint of
promiscuity, I mean--even though a man once told me in all seriousness that he
hated to think I'd been a public drinking glass."

"He had his nerve."

"I just laughed and told him to think of me rather as a loving-cup that goes from
hand to hand but should be valued none the less."

"Somehow it doesn't bother me--on the other hand it would, of course, if you'd
done any more than kiss them. But I believe you're absolutely incapable of jealousy
except as hurt vanity. Why don't you care what I've done? Wouldn't you prefer it if
I'd been absolutely innocent?"

"It's all in the impression it might have made on you. My kisses were because the
man was good-looking, or because there was a slick moon, or even because I've felt
vaguely sentimental and a little stirred. But that's all--it's had utterly no effect on
me. But you'd remember and let memories haunt you and worry you."

"Haven't you ever kissed any one like you've kissed me?"

"No," she answered simply. "As I've told you, men have tried--oh, lots of things.
Any pretty girl has that experience.... You see," she resumed, "it doesn't matter to
me how many women you've stayed with in the past, so long as it was merely a
physical satisfaction, but I don't believe I could endure the idea of your ever having
lived with another woman for a protracted period or even having wanted to marry
some possible girl. It's different somehow. There'd be all the little intimacies
remembered--and they'd dull that freshness that after all is the most precious part
of love."

Rapturously he pulled her down beside him on the pillow.

"Oh, my darling," he whispered, "as if I remembered anything but your dear

kisses."

Then Gloria, in a very mild voice:

"Anthony, did I hear anybody say they were thirsty?"

Anthony laughed abruptly and with a sheepish and amused grin got out of bed.

"With just a little piece of ice in the water," she added. "Do you suppose I could
have that?"

Gloria used the adjective "little" whenever she asked a favor--it made the favor
sound less arduous. But Anthony laughed again--whether she wanted a cake of ice
or a marble of it, he must go down-stairs to the kitchen.... Her voice followed him
through the hall: "And just a little cracker with just a little marmalade on it...."

"Oh, gosh!" sighed Anthony in rapturous slang, "she's wonderful, that girl! She has
it!"
"When we have a baby," she began one day--this, it had already been decided, was
to be after three years--"I want it to look like you."

"Except its legs," he insinuated slyly.

"Oh, yes, except his legs. He's got to have my legs. But the rest of him can be you."

"My nose?"

Gloria hesitated.

"Well, perhaps my nose. But certainly your eyes--and my mouth, and I guess my
shape of the face. I wonder; I think he'd be sort of cute if he had my hair."

"My dear Gloria, you've appropriated the whole baby."

"Well, I didn't mean to," she apologized cheerfully.

"Let him have my neck at least," he urged, regarding himself gravely in the glass.
"You've often said you liked my neck because the Adam's apple doesn't show, and,
besides, your neck's too short."

"Why, it is not!" she cried indignantly, turning to the mirror, "it's just right. I don't
believe I've ever seen a better neck."

"It's too short," he repeated teasingly.

"Short?" Her tone expressed exasperated wonder.

"Short? You're crazy!" She elongated and contracted it to convince herself of its
reptilian sinuousness. "Do you call that a short neck?"

"One of the shortest I've ever seen."

For the first time in weeks tears started from Gloria's eyes and the look she gave
him had a quality of real pain.

"Oh, Anthony--"

"My Lord, Gloria!" He approached her in bewilderment and took her elbows in his
hands. "Don't cry, please! Didn't you know I was only kidding? Gloria, look at me!
Why, dearest, you've got the longest neck I've ever seen. Honestly."

Her tears dissolved in a twisted smile.

"Well--you shouldn't have said that, then. Let's talk about the b-baby."
Anthony paced the floor and spoke as though rehearsing for a debate.

"To put it briefly, there are two babies we could have, two distinct and logical
babies, utterly differentiated. There's the baby that's the combination of the best of
both of us. Your body, my eyes, my mind, your intelligence--and then there is the
baby which is our worst--my body, your disposition, and my irresolution."

"I like that second baby," she said.

"What I'd really like," continued Anthony, "would be to have two sets of triplets one
year apart and then experiment with the six boys--"

"Poor me," she interjected.

"--I'd educate them each in a different country and by a different system and when
they were twenty-three I'd call them together and see what they were like."

"Let's have 'em all with my neck," suggested Gloria.

The End of a Chapter

The car was at length repaired and with a deliberate vengeance took up where it
left off the business of causing infinite dissension. Who should drive? How fast
should Gloria go? These two questions and the eternal recriminations involved ran
through the days. They motored to the Post-Road towns, Rye, Portchester, and
Greenwich, and called on a dozen friends, mostly Gloria's, who all seemed to be in
different stages of having babies and in this respect as well as in others bored her
to a point of nervous distraction. For an hour after each visit she would bite her
fingers furiously and be inclined to take out her rancor on Anthony.

"I loathe women," she cried in a mild temper. "What on earth can you say to them-
-except talk 'lady-lady'? I've enthused over a dozen babies that I've wanted only to
choke. And every one of those girls is either incipiently jealous and suspicious of
her husband if he's charming or beginning to be bored with him if he isn't."

"Don't you ever intend to see any women?"

"I don't know. They never seem clean to me--never--never. Except just a few.
Constance Shaw--you know, the Mrs. Merriam who came over to see us last
Tuesday--is almost the only one. She's so tall and fresh-looking and stately."

"I don't like them so tall."

Though they went to several dinner dances at various country clubs, they decided
that the autumn was too nearly over for them to "go out" on any scale, even had
they been so inclined. He hated golf; Gloria liked it only mildly, and though she
enjoyed a violent rush that some undergraduates gave her one night and was glad
that Anthony should be proud of her beauty, she also perceived that their hostess
for the evening, a Mrs. Granby, was somewhat disquieted by the fact that Anthony's
classmate, Alec Granby, joined with enthusiasm in the rush. The Granbys never
phoned again, and though Gloria laughed, it piqued her not a little.

"You see," she explained to Anthony, "if I wasn't married it wouldn't worry her--
but she's been to the movies in her day and she thinks I may be a vampire. But the
point is that placating such people requires an effort that I'm simply unwilling to
make.... And those cute little freshmen making eyes at me and paying me idiotic
compliments! I've grown up, Anthony."

Marietta itself offered little social life. Half a dozen farm-estates formed a hectagon
around it, but these belonged to ancient men who displayed themselves only as
inert, gray-thatched lumps in the back of limousines on their way to the station,
whither they were sometimes accompanied by equally ancient and doubly massive
wives. The townspeople were a particularly uninteresting type--unmarried females
were predominant for the most part--with school-festival horizons and souls bleak
as the forbidding white architecture of the three churches. The only native with
whom they came into close contact was the broad-hipped, broad-shouldered
Swedish girl who came every day to do their work. She was silent and efficient, and
Gloria, after finding her weeping violently into her bowed arms upon the kitchen
table, developed an uncanny fear of her and stopped complaining about the food.
Because of her untold and esoteric grief the girl stayed on.

Gloria's penchant for premonitions and her bursts of vague supernaturalism were
a surprise to Anthony. Either some complex, properly and scientifically inhibited
in the early years with her Bilphistic mother, or some inherited hypersensitiveness,
made her susceptible to any suggestion of the psychic, and, far from gullible about
the motives of people, she was inclined to credit any extraordinary happening
attributed to the whimsical perambulations of the buried. The desperate
squeakings about the old house on windy nights that to Anthony were burglars with
revolvers ready in hand represented to Gloria the auras, evil and restive, of dead
generations, expiating the inexpiable upon the ancient and romantic hearth. One
night, because of two swift bangs down-stairs, which Anthony fearfully but
unavailingly investigated, they lay awake nearly until dawn asking each other
examination-paper questions about the history of the world.

In October Muriel came out for a two weeks' visit. Gloria had called her on long-
distance, and Miss Kane ended the conversation characteristically by saying "All-
ll-ll righty. I'll be there with bells!" She arrived with a dozen popular songs under
her arm.
"You ought to have a phonograph out here in the country," she said, "just a little
Vic--they don't cost much. Then whenever you're lonesome you can have Caruso or
Al Jolson right at your door."

She worried Anthony to distraction by telling him that "he was the first clever man
she had ever known and she got so tired of shallow people." He wondered that
people fell in love with such women. Yet he supposed that under a certain
impassioned glance even she might take on a softness and promise.

But Gloria, violently showing off her love for Anthony, was diverted into a state of
purring content.

Finally Richard Caramel arrived for a garrulous and to Gloria painfully literary
week-end, during which he discussed himself with Anthony long after she lay in
childlike sleep up-stairs.

"It's been mighty funny, this success and all," said Dick. "Just before the novel
appeared I'd been trying, without success, to sell some short stories. Then, after my
book came out, I polished up three and had them accepted by one of the magazines
that had rejected them before. I've done a lot of them since; publishers don't pay
me for my book till this winter."

"Don't let the victor belong to the spoils."

"You mean write trash?" He considered. "If you mean deliberately injecting a
slushy fade-out into each one, I'm not. But I don't suppose I'm being so careful. I'm
certainly writing faster and I don't seem to be thinking as much as I used to.
Perhaps it's because I don't get any conversation, now that you're married and
Maury's gone to Philadelphia. Haven't the old urge and ambition. Early success and
all that."

"Doesn't it worry you?"

"Frantically. I get a thing I call sentence-fever that must be like buck-fever--it's a

sort of intense literary self-consciousness that comes when I try to force myself.
But the really awful days aren't when I think I can't write. They're when I wonder
whether any writing is worth while at all--I mean whether I'm not a sort of glorified
buffoon."

"I like to hear you talk that way," said Anthony with a touch of his old patronizing
insolence. "I was afraid you'd gotten a bit idiotic over your work. Read the
damnedest interview you gave out----"

Dick interrupted with an agonized expression.

"Good Lord! Don't mention it. Young lady wrote it--most admiring young lady.
Kept telling me my work was 'strong,' and I sort of lost my head and made a lot of
strange pronouncements. Some of it was good, though, don't you think?"

"Oh, yes; that part about the wise writer writing for the youth of his generation, the
critic of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterward."

"Oh, I believe a lot of it," admitted Richard Caramel with a faint beam. "It simply
was a mistake to give it out."

In November they moved into Anthony's apartment, from which they sallied
triumphantly to the Yale-Harvard and Harvard-Princeton football games, to the St.
Nicholas ice-skating rink, to a thorough round of the theatres and to a miscellany
of entertainments--from small, staid dances to the great affairs that Gloria loved,
held in those few houses where lackeys with powdered wigs scurried around in
magnificent Anglomania under the direction of gigantic majordomos. Their
intention was to go abroad the first of the year or, at any rate, when the war was
over. Anthony had actually completed a Chestertonian essay on the twelfth century
by way of introduction to his proposed book and Gloria had done some extensive
research work on the question of Russian sable coats--in fact the winter was
approaching quite comfortably, when the Bilphistic demiurge decided suddenly in
mid-December that Mrs. Gilbert's soul had aged sufficiently in its present
incarnation. In consequence Anthony took a miserable and hysterical Gloria out to
Kansas City, where, in the fashion of mankind, they paid the terrible and mind-
shaking deference to the dead.

Mr. Gilbert became, for the first and last time in his life, a truly pathetic figure.
That woman he had broken to wait upon his body and play congregation to his
mind had ironically deserted him--just when he could not much longer have
supported her. Never again would he be able