she married Hepworth largely that life might become a successive series of introductions to an ever varying unexpected. Instead, although her quest was feverish, she encountered only the commonplace. She was like a mouse which has discovered the inadequacy of cheese to quench its soul-yearnings. What remained?

The truth of the matter was that Perdita's world, which seemed so hopelessly askew to her, had an architectural defect. It lacked that sure antidote to ennui—a Bluebeard's closet.

Now Perdita was young and healthy. She had great curiosity, and a certain insatiable mental quality which would have successfully riveted her interest to life, but for one fact, her heart was as ardent and insatiable as her intelligence—and her husband bored her. There is no record of Bluebeard boring any of his wives.

She became more and more conscious of a continual little plaint running always through her consciousness, like the sad, monotonous murmur of an ever-flowing stream, a little unceasing plaint against life in the abstract and life in its personal application.

"There must be as many worlds as there are points of view," so ran the stream, "but my life's like a wedding-cake, all white and sparkling and overdecorated, and absolutely insipid. Candy! That's what it is ... my rooms are all pink and white, and I'm crusted over with pink sugar." Perdita always thought in color. "I'm tired of all this pink and white and baby-blue existence. I'd welcome a little scarlet and black sin for a change. Oh, it's just your corsets over again. You're put in them when you're about fifteen and you never get out of them again. We women think in corsets, breathe in them. We live in them mentally, and accept all their constrictions and restrictions as a matter of course. We take in drafts of air, and expand our lungs and say we're emancipated, but we only expand as much as the corsets allow. We've put our world in corsets, to confine us still more ... mine used to be mended, frequently washed, with some of the bones broken; now I have many pairs, brocade, satin—cloth of gold, if I want them—but they are the same thing, corsets, corsets on our bodies and brains and lives.

"Look at Cresswell. He doesn't wear corsets. He has an interesting, absorbing, unfettered life. He's using the muscles of his brain—strengthening them on some resisting substance. He's in the thick of it.... What fun! Planning, visioning things in his mind, and seeing them take form in the external. He's a builder. He wears an imperturbable mask. That's for defense; but behind it I sometimes see keen, powerful, calculating gleams in his eyes, and I want to know about them, but I can't.... I can't talk to him about any but surface things. I can't show him what is in my heart.... The corsets are between us. He's one of the great powers, and he's mine, a possession like the Kohinoor, but I do not fancy that the Kohinoor constitutes the queen's happiness.

"What are Cresswell and I to each other, anyway? Why, he's my Kohinoor, a possession of great price which endows me with distinction, and runs my credit up into the millions. He's as brilliant and cold and secretive as his prototype. And I—I'm his doll, a very jewel of a doll. One of the prettiest in the world, wonderfully dressed, exquisitely marceled, faultlessly manicured. I can smile enchantingly, and open and shut my mouth to ask for what I want and what I don't want, particularly the latter, and lisp 'thank you' when he drops a diamond necklace or a ruby tiara into my lap.

"I hate a man that puts me on a pedestal. Any woman does. He thinks I'm sugar and salt and will melt and break. I wish he'd come to me, just once, with some enthusiasm and hug me breathless. I'm tired of his everlasting chivalry and deference.... When he begins to treat me with reverence and guards my youth and all that, I'd like to swear at him like the disreputable parrot of a drunken sailor.... Wouldn't I surprise him? I wonder what he would do if I'd cut loose? Oh, dear, I wish he'd come home drunk some night and smash up some of this junk and—what is that phrase of Wallace Martin's—swipe me one; and then be penitent and remorseful and ashamed and human—instead of always being like a darned old statue of the American statesman with one hand thrust in the bosom of his frock-coat.

"I wonder—I wonder—what kind of a husband Eugene would have made. Not one of the amiable, benign, deferential ones, anyway. What were those lines 'Gene used to say?