husband's friends. It would be delightful to have nothing to do, but
make yourself liked, to be automatically disentangled from all of your
own complicated, complicating relationships with nothing around you but
a new world to conquer. And how thrilled and curious every one must be
about her. What sort of a woman had succeeded in catching dear old Tony!
Tony, who was so delightfully, so essentially, a man's man. There had
been Vivian, of course, but no one quite knew the rights and the wrongs
of that and it was over anyway. Tony was so deuced unsusceptible (Lucy
prided herself on being able to think in English), unsophisticated, too,
about women, but with a sense of self-preservation like an animal's. And
now he had gone and married an American and a Bostonian. Americans, one
knew, were heiresses and Bostonians were blue-stockings. The lady, it
appeared, was not very rich, but of course, Tony would never have
married for money. It was all very puzzling.

And then, Lucy imagined herself walking into a room full of strange,
curious faces and some one murmured, "That is Tony's wife," and every
one looked up. She was wearing a shimmering, silvery blue dress and she
was looking her very, very best. An old lady told her that she ought
still to be in school and a young man told her that she was a jolly
lucky woman and Tony a jolly lucky man, by Jove.

Lucy was sure that that was the way Englishmen talked.

And on their way home, people agreed that they could understand any
man's falling in love with her. Tony talked a lot about his men friends.
Women meant nothing to him. He had, Lucy knew, once been engaged to a
woman--Vivian, she had been called--rumour had woven a pattern of
legends about it, but he had never seemed anxious to discuss it. People
said he had behaved badly--but how was one to tell? Those things were