how it was with the ladies.  He said that Rose and he usually got down to breakfast first, and when he had listened inattentively to Mrs. March’s apology for being on her way home, he told her that she was lucky not to have gone to Schevleningen, where she and March would have frozen to death.  He said that they were going to spend September at a little place on the English coast, near by, where he had been the day before with Rose to look at lodgings, and where you could bathe all through the month.  He was not surprised that the Marches were going home, and said, Well, that was their original plan, wasn’t it?

Mrs. Kenby, appearing upon this, pretended to know better, after the outburst of joyful greeting with the Marches; and intelligently reminded Kenby that he knew the Marches had intended to pass the winter in Paris.  She was looking extremely pretty, but she wished only to make them see how well Rose was looking, and she put her arm round his shoulders as she spoke, Schevleningen had done wonders for him, but it was fearfully cold there, and now they were expecting everything from Westgate, where she advised March to come, too, for his after-cure:  she recollected in time to say, She forgot they were on their way home.  She added that she did not know when she should return; she was merely a passenger, now; she left everything to the men of the family.  She had, in fact, the air of having thrown off every responsibility, but in supremacy, not submission.  She was always ordering Kenby about; she sent him for her handkerchief, and her rings which she had left either in the tray of her trunk, or on the pin-cushion, or on the wash-stand or somewhere, and forbade him to come back without them.  He asked for her keys, and then with a joyful scream she owned that she had left the door-key in the door and the whole bunch of trunk-keys in her trunk; and Kenby treated it all as the greatest joke; Rose, too, seemed to think that Kenby would make everything come right, and he had lost that look of anxiety which he used to have; at the most he showed a friendly sympathy for Kenby, for whose sake he seemed mortified at her.  He was unable to regard his mother as the delightful joke which she appeared to Kenby, but that was merely temperamental; and he was never distressed except when she behaved with unreasonable caprice at Kenby’s cost.

As for Kenby himself he betrayed no dissatisfaction with his fate to March.  He perhaps no longer regarded his wife as that strong character which he had sometimes wearied March by celebrating; but she was still the most brilliant intelligence, and her charm seemed only to have grown with his perception of its wilful limitations.  He did not want to talk about her so much; he wanted rather to talk about Rose, his health, his education, his nature, and what was best to do for him.  The two were on terms of a confidence and affection which perpetually amused Mrs. Kenby, but which left the sympathetic witness nothing to desire in their relation.