Mr. Travers shifted uneasily on his seat.

“It’s my belief, Edith, that if you had been a man you would have led a most irregular life.  You would have been a frank adventurer.  I mean morally.  It has been a great grief to me.  You have a scorn in you for the serious side of life, for the ideas and the ambitions of the social sphere to which you belong.”

He stopped because his wife had clasped again her hands behind her head and was no longer looking at him.

“It’s perfectly obvious,” he began again.  “We have been living amongst most distinguished men and women and your attitude to them has been always so—­so negative!  You would never recognize the importance of achievements, of acquired positions.  I don’t remember you ever admiring frankly any political or social success.  I ask myself what after all you could possibly have expected from life.”

“I could never have expected to hear such a speech from you.  As to what I did expect! . . .  I must have been very stupid.”

“No, you are anything but that,” declared Mr. Travers, conscientiously.  “It isn’t stupidity.”  He hesitated for a moment.  “It’s a kind of wilfulness, I think.  I preferred not to think about this grievous difference in our points of view, which, you will admit, I could not have possibly foreseen before we. . . .”

A sort of solemn embarrassment had come over Mr. Travers.  Mrs. Travers, leaning her chin on the palm of her hand, stared at the bare matchboard side of the hut.

“Do you charge me with profound girlish duplicity?” she asked, very softly.

The inside of the deckhouse was full of stagnant heat perfumed by a slight scent which seemed to emanate from the loose mass of Mrs. Travers’ hair.  Mr. Travers evaded the direct question which struck him as lacking fineness even to the point of impropriety.

“I must suppose that I was not in the calm possession of my insight and judgment in those days,” he said.  “I—­I was not in a critical state of mind at the time,” he admitted further; but even after going so far he did not look up at his wife and therefore missed something like the ghost of a smile on Mrs. Travers’ lips.  That smile was tinged with scepticism which was too deep-seated for anything but the faintest expression.  Therefore she said nothing, and Mr. Travers went on as if thinking aloud: 

“Your conduct was, of course, above reproach; but you made for yourself a detestable reputation of mental superiority, expressed ironically.  You inspired mistrust in the best people.  You were never popular.”

“I was bored,” murmured Mrs. Travers in a reminiscent tone and with her chin resting in the hollow of her hand.

Mr. Travers got up from the seaman’s chest as unexpectedly as if he had been stung by a wasp, but, of course, with a much slower and more solemn motion.

“The matter with you, Edith, is that at heart you are perfectly primitive.”  Mrs. Travers stood up, too, with a supple, leisurely movement, and raising her hands to her hair turned half away with a pensive remark: