of course; if you hint a difference now and then, and make him convince you, he will find that stimulating; or if you can manage not to be quite convinced, but sweetly open to conviction, he will surely call again.  ‘Keep him busy every minute,’ Lady Dee used to say.  ‘Run away with him now and then—­like a spirited horse!’ And she would add, ‘But don’t let him drop the reins!’

“You can have no idea how many women there are in the world deliberately playing such parts.  Some of them admit it; others just do the thing that is easiest, and would die of horror if they were told what it is.  It is the whole of the life of a successful society woman, young or old.  Pleasing a man!  Waiting upon his moods, piquing him, flattering him, feeding his vanity—­’charming’ him!  That is what Aunt Varina wants me to do now; if I am not too crude in my description of the process, she has no hesitation in admitting the truth.  It is what she tried to do, it is what almost every woman has done who has held a family together and made a home.  I was reading Jane Eyre the other day. There is your woman’s ideal of an imperious and impetuous lover!  Listen to him, when his mood is on him!—­

“I am disposed to be gregarious and communicative to-night; and that is why I sent for you; the fire and the chandelier were not sufficient company for me; nor would Pilot have been, for none of these can talk.  To-night I am resolved to be at ease; to dismiss what importunes, and recall what pleases.  It would please me now to draw you out—­to learn more of you—­therefore speak!”

6.  It was now May, and Sylvia’s time was little more than a month off.  She had been urging me to come and visit her, but I had refused, knowing that my presence must necessarily be disturbing to both her husband and her aunt.  But now she wrote that her husband was going back to New York.  “He was staying out of a sense of duty to me,” she said.  “But his discontent was so apparent that I had to point out to him that he was doing harm to me as well as to himself.

“I doubt if you will want to come here now.  The last of the winter visitors have left.  It is really hot, so hot that you cannot get cool by going into the water.  Yet I am revelling in it; I wear almost nothing, and that white; and even the suspicious Dr. Perrin cannot but admit that I am thriving; his references to pills are purely formal.

“Lately I have not permitted myself to think much about the situation between my husband and myself.  I cannot blame him, and I cannot blame myself, and I am trying to keep my peace of mind till my baby is born.  I have found myself following half-instinctively the procedure you told me about; I talk to my own subconscious mind, and to the baby—­I command them to be well.  I whisper to them things that are not so very far from praying; but I don’t think my poor dear mamma would recognize it in its new scientific dress!