“Hold on,” he protested, “I don’t know about this Quicksands proposition.  Let’s talk it over a little more—­”

“We’ll talk it over another time,” she replied.  “But—­remember my ultimatum.  And I am only taking you there for your own good.”

“For my own good!”

“Yes.  To get you out of a rut.  To keep you from becoming commonplace and obscure and—­and everything you promised not to be when you married me,” she retorted from the doorway, her eyes still alight with that disturbing and tantalizing fire.  “It is my last desperate effort as a wife to save you from baldness, obesity, and nonentity.”  Wherewith she disappeared into her room and closed the door.

We read of earthquakes in the tropics and at the ends of the earth with commiseration, it is true, yet with the fond belief that the ground on which we have built is so firm that our own ‘lares’ and ‘penates’ are in no danger of being shaken down.  And in the same spirit we learn of other people’s domestic cataclysms.  Howard Spence had had only a slight shock, but it frightened him and destroyed his sense of immunity.  And during the week that followed he lacked the moral courage either to discuss the subject of Quicksands thoroughly or to let it alone:  to put down his foot like a Turk or accede like a Crichton.

Either course might have saved him.  One trouble with the unfortunate man was that he realized but dimly the gravity of the crisis.  He had laboured under the delusion that matrimonial conditions were still what they had been in the Eighteenth Century—­although it is doubtful whether he had ever thought of that century.  Characteristically, he considered the troublesome affair chiefly from its business side.  His ambition, if we may use so large a word for the sentiment that had filled his breast, had been coincident with his prenuptial passion for Honora.  And she had contrived, after four years, in some mysterious way to stir up that ambition once more; to make him uncomfortable; to compel him to ask himself whether he were not sliding downhill; to wonder whether living at Quicksands might not bring him in touch with important interests which had as yet eluded him.  And, above all,—­if the idea be put a little more crudely and definitely than it occurred in his thoughts, he awoke to the realization that his wife was an asset he had hitherto utterly neglected.  Inconceivable though it were (a middle-of-the-night reflection), if he insisted on trying to keep such a woman bottled up in Rivington she might some day pack up and leave him.  One never could tell what a woman would do in these days.  Les sacrees femmes.

We are indebted to Honora for this view of her husband’s mental processes.  She watched them, as it were, through a glass in the side of his head, and incidentally derived infinite amusement therefrom.  With instinctive wisdom she refrained from tinkering.