“You love too hard, my dear woman,” Alice Valentine remonstrated affectionately; “nothing is worse than extremes in anything.  Say to yourself, like a sensible girl, that you have a good husband, and let it go at that!  Be as cool and cheerful with Warren as if he were—­George, for instance, and try to interest yourself in something entirely outside your own home.  I wonder if perhaps this place isn’t a little lonely for you?  Why don’t you try Bar Harbor or one of the mountain places next year, and go about among people, and entertain a little more?”

“But, Alice, people bore me so—­I’ve had so much of it, and it’s always the same thing!”

“I know; I hate it, too.  But there are funny phases in marriage, Rachael, and one has to take them as they come.  Warren might like it.”

Rachael pondered.  Elinor Pomeroy and the Villalongas, the Whittakers and Stokes and Parmalees again!  Noise and hurry, and dancing and smoking and drinking again!  She sighed.

“I believe I’ll suggest it to Warren, Alice.  Then if he’s keen for it, we’ll do it next year.”

“I would.”  Mrs. Valentine rose, and looked toward the beach with an idea of locating Martha and Katrina before sending for them.  “Isn’t it almost lunch time?” she asked, adding in a matter-of-fact tone:  “Don’t worry any more, Rachael; it’s largely a bad habit.  Just look the whole thing in the face, and map it out like a campaign.  ‘The way to begin living the ideal life is to begin,’ my father used to say!”

This talk, and others like it, had the effect of bracing Rachael to fresh endurance and of spurring her to fresh courage for the few days that its effect lasted.  But sooner or later her bravery would die away, and an increasing discouragement possess her.  Lying in her bare, airy bedroom at night, with sombre eyes staring at the arch of stars above the moving sea, an almost unbearable loneliness would fall upon soul and body; she needed Warren, she said to herself, often with bitter tears.  Warren, splashing in his bath, scattering wet towels and discarded garments so royally about the place; Warren, in a discursive mood, regarding some operation as he stropped his razor; Warren’s old, half-unthinking “you look sweet, dear,” when, fresh and dainty, his wife was ready to go downstairs—­for these and a thousand other memories of him she yearned with an aching desire that racked her like a bodily pain.

“Oh, it isn’t right for him to torture me so!” she would whisper to herself.  “It isn’t right!”

October found them all back in the city, an apparently united and devoted family again.  Rachael entered with great zest into the delayed matter of redecorating and refurnishing the old home on Washington Square, finding the dignified house—­Warren’s birthplace—­more and more to her liking as modern enamel fixtures went into the bathrooms, simple modern hangings let sunshine and air in at the long-darkened windows, and rich tapestry papers and Oriental rugs subdued the effect of severe cream woodwork and colonial mantels.