’I’m not thinking of that.  I always like going anywhere with you; but I have plenty of occupations and pleasures at home.—­I think we ought to be under the same roof.’

’Ought?  Because Mrs. Tomkins would cry haro! if her husband the greengrocer wasn’t at her elbow day and night?’

’Have more patience with me.  I didn’t mean ought in the vulgar sense—­I have as little respect for Mrs. Tomkins as you have.  I don’t want to interfere with your liberty for a moment; indeed it would be very foolish, for I know that it would make you detest me.  But I so often want to speak to you—­and—­and then, I can’t quite feel that you acknowledge me as your wife so long as I am away.’

Tarrant nodded.

’I quite understand.  The social difficulty.  Well, there’s no doubt it is a difficulty; I feel it on your account.  I wish it were possible for you to be invited wherever I am.  Some day it will be, if I don’t get run over in the Strand; but—­’

‘I should like the invitations,’ Nancy broke in, ’but you still don’t understand me.’

’Yes, I think I do.  You are a woman, and it’s quite impossible for a woman to see this matter as a man does.  Nancy, there is not one wife in fifty thousand who retains her husband’s love after the first year of marriage.  Put aside the fools and the worthless; think only of women with whom you might be compared—­brave, sensible, pure-hearted; they can win love, but don’t know how to keep it.’

’Why not put it the other way about, and say that men can love to begin with, but so soon grow careless?’

‘Because I am myself an instance to the contrary.’

Nancy smiled, but was not satisfied.

‘The only married people,’ Tarrant pursued, ’who can live together with impunity, are those who are rich enough, and sensible enough, to have two distinct establishments under the same roof.  The ordinary eight or ten-roomed house, inhabited by decent middle-class folk, is a gruesome sight.  What a huddlement of male and female!  They are factories of quarrel and hate—­those respectable, brass-curtain-rodded sties—­they are full of things that won’t bear mentioning.  If our income never rises above that, we shall live to the end of our days as we do now.’

Nancy looked appalled.

‘But how can you hope to make thousands a year?’

’I have no such hope; hundreds would be sufficient.  I don’t aim at a house in London; everything there is intolerable, except the fine old houses which have a history, and which I could never afford.  For my home, I want to find some rambling old place among hills and woods,—­some house where generations have lived and died,—­where my boy, as he grows up, may learn to love the old and beautiful things about him.  I myself never had a home; most London children don’t know what is meant by home; their houses are only more or less comfortable lodgings, perpetual change within and without.’