“I’ve made an ass of myself,” he used to think, sorting out his cards for solitaire and looking furtively at the thin face, with its lines of wistful and faded beauty.  At forty-two, a happy, busy woman, with a sound digestion, will not look faded; on the contrary, she is at her best—­as far as looks are concerned!  Eleanor was not happy; her digestion was uncertain; she did not go into society, and she had no real occupation, except to go every day to Mrs. O’Brien’s and take Bingo for a walk.  Even her practicing had been pretty much given up, for fear of disturbing the people on the floor below her.

“Why don’t you have some plants around?” Maurice suggested; “they’d give you something to do!  I saw a lot of hyacinths growing in glasses, once; I’ll buy some bulbs for you.”

“Oh, I’m one of the people flowers won’t grow for,” she said.

Mrs. Newbolt made a suggestion, too.  “Pity you can’t have Bingo to keep you company.  That’s what comes of boarding.  I knew a woman who boarded, and she lost her teeth.  Chambermaid threw ’em away.  Come in and see me any evening when Maurice is out.”

As Maurice was frequently out, the invitation was sometimes accepted, and it was on one of these occasions that Mrs. Newbolt, spreading out her cards on the green baize of her solitaire table with fat, beringed hands, made her suggestion: 

“Eleanor, you’ve aged.  I believe you’re unhappy?”

“No, I’m not!  Why should I be?”

“Well, I wouldn’t blame you if you were,” Mrs. Newbolt said. “’Course you’d have brought it on yourself; I could have told you what to expect!  Your dear uncle Thomas used to say that, after a thing happened, I was the one to tell people that they might have expected it.  You see, I made a point of bein’ intelligent; of course I wasn’t too intelligent.  A man doesn’t like that.  You’re gettin’ gray, Eleanor.  Pity you haven’t children. He doesn’t look very contented!—­but men are men,” said Mrs. Newbolt.

“He ought to be contented,” Eleanor said, passionately; “I adore him!”

“You’ve got to interest him,” her aunt said; “that’s more important than adorin’ him!  A man can buy a certain kind of adoration, but he can’t purchase interest.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Eleanor said, trembling.

“Well, if you don’t, I’m sure I can’t tell you,” Mrs. Newbolt said, despairingly; but she made one more attempt:  “My dear father used to say that the finest tribute a man could put on his wife’s tombstone would be, ‘She was interestin’ to live with.’  So I tell you, Eleanor, if you want to hold that boy, make him laugh!” She was so much in earnest that for a few minutes she actually stopped talking!

Eleanor could not make Maurice laugh—­she never made anybody laugh!  But for a while she did “hold him”—­because he was a gallant youngster, making the best of his bargain.  That he had begun to know it was a bad bargain did not lessen his regret for his wife’s childlessness, which he knew made her unhappy, nor his pity for her physical forlornness—­which he blamed largely on himself:  “She almost died that night on the mountain, to save my life!”