afraid of her husband's criticism, and spared her many of those
tremors common to the first months of married life. Also, it gave
her an occasional chance to influence him, even to protect him
from his own indifference to this issue or that.

She laughed at him, accusing him of being an impostor. Why,
everyone thought Dr. Warren Gregory, with his big scowl and his
firm-set jaw, was an absolute Tartar, she exulted, when as a
matter of fact he was only a little boy afraid of his wife! He
hated, she learned, to be uncertain as to just the degree of
dressing expected of him on different occasions, he hated to enter
hotels by the wrong doors, to hear her dispraise an opera
generally approved, or find good in a book branded by the critics
as worthless. With all his pride in her beauty, he could not bear
to have her conspicuous; if her laughter or her unusual voice
attracted any attention in a public place, she could see that it
made him uncomfortable. These things Rachael might have considered
flaws in another man. In Warren they were only deliciously
amusing, and his reliance upon her, where she had expected only
absolute self-possession from him, seemed to make him more her
own.

Rachael, daughter of wandering adventurers, had a thousand times
more assurance than he. In her secret heart she had no regard for
any social law; society was a tool to be used, not a weight under
which one struggled helplessly. She dictated where he followed
precedent; she laughed where he was filled with apprehension.
Seriously, she set her wits and her love to the task of
accustoming him to joy, and day by day he flung off the old, half-
defined reluctances that still bound him, and entered more fully