"It was a short courtship--delay was a word not found in Ralph Buckner's
vocabulary. We were married and began our life at his ranch, which, as I
say, was near enough to my father so that we could be in frequent
communication. He had been much concerned about me, having discovered
more of my homesickness for the East than I had realized, so to see me
well settled and apparently happy relieved him of a heavy load."

"But you weren't happy even at first," Alice insisted. "How could you
be?"

"I say 'apparently happy,' dear, for that was all it was. Ralph did what
he could for me in his own way, so at first it was perhaps my fault
that we were not more congenial; but his ways were not my ways, and I
kept looking for what was not there. He was well-born, but his life on
the ranch for so many years had dulled his appreciation of those finer,
innate qualities which every wife craves--he had forgotten how to be the
gentleman. Don't think that I expected the impossible, or anything
incongruous to the life we were leading; but there are little
attentions, thoughtful considerations and other things in a husband's
relation to his wife, trivial perhaps in themselves, which the wife
expects and misses if she does not receive--the more so, if she has
deluded herself into believing that the instincts for them are inborn,
and only require her suggestion to develop and bring them to fruition.
These qualities he had seemed to show before we were married, but they
proved to be only a veneer which soon wore off."

"Why do you bring this all back now ?" Alice asked, sympathetically,
seeing the lines deepen in Eleanor's face.