cross to bear, as the vicar said last Sunday, and open insult from my
husband is mine. I can't complain; I married you with my eyes open."

Mrs. Chater revealed this secret of her girlhood in a voice which
implied that most young women go through the ceremony with their eyes
tightly closed, mixed a second brandy-and-soda for her shattered
nerves, swallowed it with the air of one draining a poison flask by
way of happy release from martyrdom, banged down the glass, and,
before her amazed husband could open his lips, hammered in the attack
from a third quarter.

"Little you would have cared," cried she, "if a miracle had not saved
my life this afternoon!"

Mr. Chater stood aghast. "My dearest! Saved you! From what?"

His dearest bitterly inquired: "What does it matter to you? You take
no interest. If my battered corpse--" Swept to tremendous heights by
the combined forces of her agitation, her imagination, and her two
brandys-and-sodas, she rose, pointed though the window. "If my
battered corpse had been carried up those steps by two policemen this
very afternoon, what would you have done, I wonder?"

Mr. Chater, apprehension creeping among the roots of his hair,
affirmed that he would have dropped dead in the precise spot at which
he happened to be standing at the moment.

Mrs. Chater trumpeted "Never!"--dropped to her chair, and continued.
"You would have been glad." Her voice shook. "Glad--and in all this
wide world only my Bob and my blessed lambs in the nursery would have