And thenceforth ensued strange things.  There were experiments, and there was even a cooking-school episode, Harlson, at this period, professing great weariness, and sometimes, after meals, simulating pains which required much attention, though drugs were vigorously refused.  All he wanted was strictly personal care.  It is to be feared that he was not honest as to details, though honest as a whole.  And he would go marketing with the brown woman, who had become so practical, and they became critical together, and the gourmands, wise old men about town, whom he brought, occasionally, to dine with him, began to wonder how it was that they found such perfection at a private table.  And, as for the woman, well, she passed so far beyond her clumsy Mentor that he became but as the babe which doesn’t know, and had nothing to say in her august presence.  He might talk about a cheese or a wine or some such trifle, but how small a portion of living are cheese and wine!

The first year of wedded life is experimental, though it be with the pair best mated since the world began.  There is an unconscious dropping of all surface traits and all disguises, and a showing of heart and brain to the one other.  Never lived the woman so self-contained and tactful that, at the end of a year, her husband, if he were a man of ordinary intelligence, did not know her for what she was worth; never the man so thoughtful and discreet that he was not estimated at his value by the one so near him.  This I have been told by men and women who should know.  I lack the trial which should give wisdom to myself, but I am inclined to accept the dictum of these others.  It must be so, from force of circumstances.

It was pleasant to me to watch this man and woman.  It seemed to me that the hard lines in Grant Harlson’s face became, week by week and month by month, less harshly and clearly defined, while upon the face of his wife grew that new look of a content and ownership which marks the woman who sleeps in some man’s arms, the one who owns her—­the same look which Grant, with his broader experience and keener insight, used to recognize when he puzzled me so in telling whimsically, in the street cars, who were wedded, without looking at their rings.  It may have been a fancy, but it seemed to me the two grew very much to look alike.  It was in no feature, in nothing I can describe, but in something beyond words, in a certain way which cannot be defined.  It may have been but the unconscious imitation by each of some trick of the other’s speech, or manner, but it appeared a deeper thing.  I cannot explain it.

They were not much apart, those two.  Sometimes Harlson would be called away by some business or political emergency, and then would occur what impressed me as a silly thing, deeply as I cared, for each.  He would get railroad tickets for two, and they would go riotously across the country, playing at keeping house in a state-room, and enjoying themselves beyond all reason.  I explained often to each of them that it wasn’t fair to the other; that he could attend to business better in some distant city without having to report to her at a hotel, and that it would be more comfortable for her in her own fair home; and the two idiots would but laugh at me.