“His letter doesn’t sound as if he thought of you as a burden,” Alix suggested, mildly.

“Ah, well, the minute I leave him he has a different tone,” Cherry explained, and Peter said, with a glance almost of surprise at his wife: 

“It’s an awfully difficult position for a woman of any pride, dear!”

Alix, kneeling to adjust the fire, as she was constantly tempted to do, met his look, and laid a soot-streaked hand on his knee.

“Pete, dearest, of course it is!  But—­” and Alix looked doubtfully from one to the other—­“but divorce is a hateful thing!” she added, shaking her head, “it—­it never seems to me justifiable!”

“Divorce is an institution,” Peter said.  “You may not like it any more than you like prisons or mad-houses; it has its uses.”

“People get divorces every day!” Cherry added.  “Isn’t divorce better than living along in marriage—­without love?”

“Oh, love!” Alix said, scornfully.  “Love is just another name for passion and selfishness and laziness, half the time!”

“You can say that, because yours is one of the happy marriages,” Cherry said.  “It might be very different—­if Peter weren’t Peter!”

As she said his name she sent him her trusting smile, her blue eyes shone with affection, and the exquisite curve of her mouth deepened.  Peter smiled back, and looked away in a little confusion.

“I can’t imagine the circumstances under which I shouldn’t love you and Peter!” Alix summarized it, triumphantly.

“And Martin?” Peter asked.

“Ah, well, I didn’t marry Martin!” his wife reminded him quickly.  “I didn’t promise to love and honour Martin in sickness and health, for richer for poorer, for better for worse—­by George!” Alix interrupted herself, in her boyish way, “those are terrific words, you know.  And a promise is a promise!”

“And even for infidelity, you don’t believe people ought to separate?” Cherry asked.

“Nonsense!” Peter said.

“But you said—­that Martin never—­”

“No, I’m not speaking of Martin now!”

“Well, wouldn’t that come under ’worser’?” Alix asked.

“But, my child,” Peter expostulated kindly, “my dear benighted wife—­there is such a thing as a soul—­a mind—­a personality!  To be tied to a—­well, to a coarsening influence day after day is living death!  It is worse than any bodily discomfort—­”

“I don’t see it!” Alix persisted.  “I think there’s a lot of nonsense talked about the fammy oncompreezy—­but it seems to me that if you have a home and meals and books and friends and the country to walk in, you—­”

“Oh, Heavens, Alix, you don’t know what you’re talking about!” Cherry interrupted her, impatiently.  “Let Peter here go off with some chorus girl, and see how long you—­”

“It’s all very well in books,” Alix interrupted her sister in turn.  “But in real life I don’t believe a woman ever bothers to think whether her husband ever murmurs her name in dreams or not.  I know I take Peter as much for granted as I do Tamalpais; if he ever leaped from the track, and stole or got drunk or wandered off after some petticoat, I’d fix him!  I’d be furious, but I don’t see myself leaving him.”