She laughed at him, accusing him of being an impostor.  Why, everyone thought Dr. Warren Gregory, with his big scowl and his firm-set jaw, was an absolute Tartar, she exulted, when as a matter of fact he was only a little boy afraid of his wife!  He hated, she learned, to be uncertain as to just the degree of dressing expected of him on different occasions, he hated to enter hotels by the wrong doors, to hear her dispraise an opera generally approved, or find good in a book branded by the critics as worthless.  With all his pride in her beauty, he could not bear to have her conspicuous; if her laughter or her unusual voice attracted any attention in a public place, she could see that it made him uncomfortable.  These things Rachael might have considered flaws in another man.  In Warren they were only deliciously amusing, and his reliance upon her, where she had expected only absolute self-possession from him, seemed to make him more her own.

Rachael, daughter of wandering adventurers, had a thousand times more assurance than he.  In her secret heart she had no regard for any social law; society was a tool to be used, not a weight under which one struggled helplessly.  She dictated where he followed precedent; she laughed where he was filled with apprehension.  Seriously, she set her wits and her love to the task of accustoming him to joy, and day by day he flung off the old, half-defined reluctances that still bound him, and entered more fully into the delights of the care-free, radiant hours that lay before them.

His wife saw the change in him, and rejoiced.  But what she did not see, as the months went on, was the no less marked change in herself.  As Warren’s nature expanded, and as he began to reach quite naturally for the various pleasures all about him, Rachael’s soul experienced an alteration almost directly opposed.

She became thoughtful, almost reserved, she began to show a certain respect for convention—­not for the social conventions at which she had always laughed, and still laughed, but for the fundamental laws of truth, simplicity, and cleanness, upon which the ideal of civilization, at least, is based.  She noticed that she was beginning to like “good” persons, even homely, dowdy, good persons, like Alice and George Valentine.  She lost her old appetite for scandal, for ugly stories, for reckless speech.

Warren, freed once and for all from his old prejudice, found nothing troublesome now in the thought that she had been another man’s wife; it was a common situation, it was generally approved.  As in other things, he had had stupidly conventional ideas about it once—­that was all.  But Rachael winced at the sound of the word “divorce,” not because of her own divorce, but at the thought that some other man and woman had promised in their first love what later they could not fulfil, and hated each other now where they had loved each other once, at the thought that perhaps—­perhaps one of them loved the other still!