Nancy sighed.

‘Then there are years of it still before me.’

’Heaven forbid!  Some years, no doubt, before we shall have a home; but not before I can bring you in contact with the kind of people you ought to know.  You shall have a decent house—­socially possible—­somewhere out west; and I, of course, shall still go on in lodgings.’

He waited for Nancy’s reply, but she kept silence.

‘You are still dissatisfied?’

She looked up, and commanded her features to the expression which makes whatever woman lovely—­that of rational acquiescence.  On the faces of most women such look is never seen.

’No, I am content.  You are working hard, and I won’t make it harder for you.’

‘Speak always like that!’ Tarrant’s face was radiant.  ’That’s the kind of thing that binds man to woman, body and soul.  With the memory of that look and speech, would it be possible for me to slight you in my life apart?  It makes you my friend; and the word friend is better to my ear than wife.  A man’s wife is more often than not his enemy.  Harvey Munden was telling me of a poor devil of an author who daren’t be out after ten at night because of the fool-fury waiting for him at home.’

Nancy laughed.

‘I suppose she can’t trust him.’

’And suppose she can’t?  What is the value of nominal fidelity, secured by mutual degradation such as that?  A rational woman would infinitely rather have a husband who was often unfaithful to her than keep him faithful by such means.  Husband and wife should interfere with each other not a jot more than two friends of the same sex living together.  If a man, under such circumstances, worried his friend’s life out by petty prying, he would get his head punched.  A wife has no more justification in worrying her husband with jealousies.’

‘How if it were the wife that excited suspicion?’ asked Nancy.

’Infidelity in a woman is much worse than in a man.  If a man really suspects his wife, he must leave her, that’s all; then let her justify herself if she can.’

Nancy cared little to discuss this point.  In argument with any one else, she would doubtless have maintained the equality of man and woman before the moral law; but that would only have been in order to prove herself modern-spirited.  Tarrant’s dictum did not revolt her.

‘Friends are equals,’ she said, after a little thought.  ’But you don’t think me your equal, and you won’t be satisfied with me unless I follow your guidance.’

Tarrant laughed kindly.

’True, I am your superior in force of mind and force of body.  Don’t you like to hear that?  Doesn’t it do you good—­when you think of the maudlin humbug generally talked by men to women?  We can’t afford to disguise that truth.  All the same, we are friends, because each has the other’s interest at heart, and each would be ashamed to doubt the other’s loyalty.’