“Is anything the matter, Nigel?” she asked at first, wondering if she were guilty of silliness in trying to slip her hand into his.  She was sure she had been when he answered her.

“No,” he said chillingly.

“I don’t believe you are happy,” she returned.  “Somehow you seem so—­so different.”

“I have reasons for being depressed,” he replied, and it was with a stiff finality which struck a note of warning to her, signifying that it would be better taste in her to put an end to her simple efforts.

She vaguely felt herself put in the wrong, and he preferred that it should be so.  It was the best form of preparation for any mood he might see that it might pay him to show her in the future.  He was, in fact, confronting disdainfully his position.  He had her on his hands and he was returning to his relations with no definite advantage to exhibit as the result of having married her.  She had been supplied with an income but he had no control over it.  It would not have been so if he had not been in such straits that he had been afraid to risk his chance by making a stand.  To have a wife with money, a silly, sweet temper and no will of her own, was of course better than to be penniless, head over heels in debt and hemmed in by difficulties on every side.  He had seen women trained to give in to anything rather than be bullied in public, to accede in the end to any demand rather than endure the shame of a certain kind of scene made before servants, and a certain kind of insolence used to relatives and guests.  The quality he found most maddeningly irritating in Rosalie was her obviously absolute unconsciousness of the fact that it was entirely natural and proper that her resources should be in her husband’s hands.  He had, indeed, even in these early days, made a tentative effort or so in the form of a suggestive speech; he had given her openings to give him an opening to put things on a practical basis, but she had never had the intelligence to see what he was aiming at, and he had found himself almost floundering ungracefully in his remarks, while she had looked at him without a sign of comprehension in her simple, anxious blue eyes.  The creature was actually trying to understand him and could not.  That was the worst of it, the blank wall of her unconsciousness, her childlike belief that he was far too grand a personage to require anything.  These were the things he was thinking over when he walked up and down the deck in unamiable solitariness.  Rosy awakened to the amazed consciousness of the fact that, instead of being pleased with the luxury and prettiness of her wardrobe and appointments, he seemed to dislike and disdain them.

“You American women change your clothes too much and think too much of them,” was one of his first amiable criticisms.  “You spend more than well-bred women should spend on mere dresses and bonnets.  In New York it always strikes an Englishman that the women look endimanche at whatever time of day you come across them.”