natures are being starved, or some silly thing like that. And of course,
if you're that way, you're always trying experiments, just the way
people do with health foods. In the end, they generally settle on
Bertie. He's perfectly safe, you know--just as anxious as they are not
to do anything really outrageous. Bertie keeps them in a pleasant sort
of flutter, and maybe he does them good. I don't know.--Drink your tea,
Violet. We've got to run."

That was explicit enough anyway. But it didn't solve Rose's
problem--broadened and deepened it rather, and gave it a greater basis
of reality. It was silly, of course, always to be asking yourself
questions. But after all, you didn't question a thing that wasn't
questionable. There had been no necessity for a compromise between
romance and reality in her own case. She hadn't any need of a
thermometer. Why had they?

Of course she knew well enough that marriage was not always the blissful
transformation it had been for her. There were unhappy marriages. There
were such things in the world as unfaithful husbands and brutal drunken
husbands, who had to be divorced. And equally, too, there were
cold-blooded, designing, mercenary wives. (In the back of her mind was
the unacknowledged notion that these people existed generally in novels.
She knew, of course, that those characters must have real prototypes
somewhere. Only, it hadn't occurred to her to identify them with people
of her own acquaintance.) But the idea had been that, barring these
tragic and disastrous types, marriage was a state whose happy
satisfactoriness could, more or less, be taken for granted.

Oh, there were bumps and bruises, of course. She hadn't forgotten that
tragic hour in the canoe last summer. There had, indeed, been two or