Whose fault was it that they two could not seem to understand each
other, could not seem to live out their lives together in honorable
and dignified companionship, as generations of their forebears had
done?

"Perhaps everyone's marriage is more or less like ours," Margaret
mused miserably. "Perhaps there's no such thing as a happy
marriage."

Almost all the women that she knew admitted unhappiness of one sort
or another, and discussed their domestic troubles freely. Margaret
had never sunk to that; it would not even have been a relief to a
nature as self-sufficient and as cold as hers. But for years she had
felt that her marriage tie was an irksome and distasteful bond, and
only that afternoon she had been stung by the bitter fact that the
state of affairs between her husband and herself was no secret from
their world. A certain audacious newspaper had boldly hinted that
there would soon be a sensational separation in the Kirby household,
whose beautiful mistress would undoubtedly follow her first unhappy
marital experience with another--and, it was to be hoped, a more
fortunate--marriage.

Margaret had laughed when the article was shown her, with the easy
flippancy that is the stock in trade of her type of society woman;
but the arrow had reached her very soul, nevertheless.

So it had come to that, had it? She and John had failed! They were
to be dragged through the publicity, the humiliations, that precede
the sundering of what God has joined together. They had drifted, as
so many hundreds and thousands of men and women drift, from the