Always in the later years Rachael could feel the joy of these days again when she caught the scent of fresh violets.  Never a day passed that Warren did not send her or bring her a fragrant boxful.  They quivered on the breast of her gown, and on her dressing-table they made her bedroom sweet.  Now and then when she and Warren were to be alone she braided her dark hair and wound it about her head, tucking a few violets against the rich plaits, conscious that the classic simplicity of the arrangement enhanced her beauty, and was pleased in his pleasure.

It suited her whim to carry out the little affectation in her soaps and toilet waters; he could not pick up her handkerchief or hold her wrap for her without freeing the delicate faint odor of her favorite flower.  When they met downtown for dinner there was always the little ceremony of finding the florist, and all the operas this winter were mingled for Rachael with the most exquisite fragrance in the world.

These days were perfect.  It was only when the outside world entered their paradise that anything less than perfect happiness entered, too.  Rachael’s old friends—­Judy Moran, Elinor, and the Villalongas—­said, and said with truth, that she had changed.  She had not tried to change, but it was hard for her to get the old point of view now, to laugh at the old jokes, to listen to the old gossip.  She had been cold and wretched only a year before, but she had had the confident self-sufficiency of a gypsy who walks bareheaded and irresponsible through a world whose treasure will never come her way.  Now Rachael, tremulous and afraid, was the guardian of the great treasure, she knew now what love meant, and she could no longer face even the thought of a life without love.

Tirelessly, and with increasing satisfaction, she studied her husband’s character, finding, like all new wives, that almost all her preconceived ideas of him had been wrong.  Like all the world, she had always fancied Greg something of an autocrat, positive almost to stubbornness in his views.

Now it was amusing to discover that he was really a rather mild person, except where his work was concerned, rarely taking the initiative in either praising or blaming anybody or anything, deeply influenced by the views of other persons, and content to be rather a listener and onlooker than an active participant in what did not immediately concern him.  Rachael found this, for some subtle reasons of her own, highly pleasing.  It made her less afraid of her husband’s criticism, and spared her many of those tremors common to the first months of married life.  Also, it gave her an occasional chance to influence him, even to protect him from his own indifference to this issue or that.