always the little ceremony of finding the florist, and all the
operas this winter were mingled for Rachael with the most
exquisite fragrance in the world.

These days were perfect. It was only when the outside world
entered their paradise that anything less than perfect happiness
entered, too. Rachael's old friends--Judy Moran, Elinor, and the
Villalongas--said, and said with truth, that she had changed. She
had not tried to change, but it was hard for her to get the old
point of view now, to laugh at the old jokes, to listen to the old
gossip. She had been cold and wretched only a year before, but she
had had the confident self-sufficiency of a gypsy who walks
bareheaded and irresponsible through a world whose treasure will
never come her way. Now Rachael, tremulous and afraid, was the
guardian of the great treasure, she knew now what love meant, and
she could no longer face even the thought of a life without love.

Tirelessly, and with increasing satisfaction, she studied her
husband's character, finding, like all new wives, that almost all
her preconceived ideas of him had been wrong. Like all the world,
she had always fancied Greg something of an autocrat, positive
almost to stubbornness in his views.

Now it was amusing to discover that he was really a rather mild
person, except where his work was concerned, rarely taking the
initiative in either praising or blaming anybody or anything,
deeply influenced by the views of other persons, and content to be
rather a listener and onlooker than an active participant in what
did not immediately concern him. Rachael found this, for some
subtle reasons of her own, highly pleasing. It made her less