Partly they were unsatisfactory, no doubt.  All her rights were not hers even now—­no, not by a long way.  But oh, how much better was this than the drab and shabby and barren existence for ever left behind!  She was bound, indeed; yet she was free—­freer than another might have been in her place, and far, far less bound.  One must expect to pay some tax to Fortune for such extraordinary gifts, and Frances was not the one to pay it in heart’s blood.  She was philosophically prepared to pay it in her own coin, and be done with it, and then give herself to the enjoyment of the pleasures of her lot.

Her first enjoyment was in her beautiful going-away dress—­grey cloth and chinchilla fur, with flushes of pink as delicate as the rose of her cheeks—­and in her knowledge of the effect she made in that dream of a costume.  There was no hiding her light under a bushel any more.  The highway, and the middle of it, for her now—­her proud husband strutting there beside her—­and every passer-by turning to look at and to admire her.  There was joy in the occupancy of the best suite of rooms in the best hotel at every place she stopped at during her gay and well-filled bridal holiday; joy in the dainty meals—­so long unknown; in the obsequious servants, in the plentiful theatres, in the ever-ready carriage that took her to them, in the having one’s hair done to perfection by an expert maid, in sweeping forth with one’s silks and laces trailing, and one’s diamonds on.  These were the delights for which her little soul had so long yearned; she now pursued them greedily.  She could not rest if she were not doing something to display herself and feed her craving for what is known as seeing the world.  Her husband was almost as obsequious as the servants—­doubtless because from the first she took the beauty’s high hand with him, as well as the attitude of the superior, naturally assumed by youth towards age—­and he enjoyed the sensation she made almost as much as she did.  Visibly he swelled and preened himself when his venerable contemporaries cast the eye of surprise, not to say of envy, upon the conjunction of his complacent figure and that of the bride who might have been his grand-daughter; he toiled for that pleasure, and to make pleasure for her, as no old gentleman should toil; he gave her everything she asked for, including his own ease and consequence, his own vital health and strength.

But the honeymoon waned, and the novelty wore off, and prudence and old habits resumed their sway.  He grew tired of incessant gadding about, alarmed at his symptoms of physical overstrain, weary for his arm-chair and his club, and his men friends and his masculine occupations.  She, on the other hand, insatiable for admiration and excitement still, was weary of his constant company.  It became the kill-joy of her festive days, growing from a necessary bore to an intolerable irritation as the dimensions of her little court of younger gallants enlarged about her.  Therefore she had no objection to his halting on the toilsome path, so long as he allowed her to go on alone.