So, apart from voluntary service on behalf of Jack Junior, she was free as of old to order her days as she pleased.  Yet that small morsel of humanity demanded much of her time, because she released through the maternal floodgates a part of that passionate longing to bestow love where her heart willed.  Sometimes she took issue with herself over that wayward tendency.  By all the rules of the game, she should have loved her husband.  He was like a rock, solid, enduring, patient, kind, and generous.  He stood to her in the most intimate relation that can exist between a man and a woman.  But she never fooled herself; she never had so far as Jack Fyfe was concerned.  She liked him, but that was all.  He was good to her, and she was grateful.

Sometimes she had a dim sense that under his easy-going exterior lurked a capacity for tremendously passionate outbreak.  If she had been compelled to modify her first impression of him as an arrogant, dominant sort of character, scarcely less rough than the brown firs out of which he was hewing a fortune, she knew likewise that she had never seen anything but the sunny side of him.  He still puzzled her a little at times; there were odd flashes of depths she could not see into, a quality of unexpectedness in things he would do and say.  Even so, granting that in him was embodied so much that other men she knew lacked, she did not love him; there were indeed times when she almost resented him.

Why, she could not perhaps have put into words.  It seemed too fantastic for sober summing-up, when she tried.  But lurking always in the background of her thoughts was the ghost of an unrealized dream, a nebulous vision which once served to thrill her in secret.  It could never be anything but a vision, she believed now, and believing, regretted.  The cold facts of her existence couldn’t be daydreamed away.  She was married, and marriage put a full stop to the potential adventuring of youth.  Twenty and maidenhood lies at the opposite pole from twenty-four and matrimony.  Stella subscribed to that.  She took for her guiding-star—­theoretically—­the twin concepts of morality and duty as she had been taught to construe them.  So she saw no loophole, and seeing none, felt cheated of something infinitely precious.  Marriage and motherhood had not come to her as the fruits of love, as the passionately eager fulfilling of her destiny.  It had been thrust upon her.  She had accepted it as a last resort at a time when her powers of resistance to misfortune were at the ebb.

She knew that this sort of self-communing was a bad thing, that it was bound to sour the whole taste of life in her mouth.  As much as possible she thrust aside those vague, repressed longings.  Materially she had everything.  If she had foregone that bargain with Jack Fyfe, God only knew what long-drawn agony of mind and body circumstances and Charlie Benton’s subordination of her to his own ends might have inflicted upon her.  That was the reverse of her shield, but one that grew dimmer as time passed.  Mostly, she took life as she found it, concentrating upon Jack Junior, a sturdy boy with blue eyes like his father, and who grew steadily more adorable.