He is downstairs now in the smoking room, impatiently humoring this lifelong habit of mine to have one hour of the day all to myself.

My mother taught me this when I was a tiny girl.  My “thinking hour,” she called it, a time when I solved my small problems or pondered my baby sins.  All my life I have kept up the practice.  And now I am going to devote it to another request of the little mother who went away from me forever last year.

“Margaret, darling,” she said to me on the last day we ever talked together, “some time you are going to marry—­you do not think so now, but you will—­and how I wish I had time to warn you of all the hidden rocks in your course!  If I only had kept a record of those days of my own unhappiness, you might learn to avoid the wretchedness that was mine.  Promise me that if you marry you will write down the problems that confront you and your solution of them, so than when your own baby girl comes to you and grows into womanhood she may be helped by your experience.”

Poor little mother!  Her marriage with my father had been one of those wretched tragedies, the knowledge of which frightens so many people away from the altar.  I have no memory of my father.  I do not know today whether he be living or dead.  When I was 4 years old he ran away with the woman who had been my mother’s most intimate friend.  All my life has been warped by the knowledge.  Even now, worshipping Dicky as I do, I am wondering as I sit here, obeying my mother’s last request, whether or not an experience like hers will come to me.

A fine augury for our happiness when such thoughts as this can come to me on my wedding day!

Dicky is an artist, with all the faults and all the lovable virtues of his kind.  A week ago I was a teacher, holding one of the most desirable positions in the city schools.  We met just six months ago, two of the most unsuited people who could be thrown together.  And now we are married!  Next week we begin housekeeping in a dear little apartment near Dicky’s studio.

Dicky has insisted that I give up my work, and against all my convictions I have yielded to his wishes.  But on my part I have stipulated that I must be permitted to do the housework of our nest, with the occasional help of a laundress.  I will be no parasite wife who neither helps her husband in or out of the home.  But the little devils must be busy laughing just now.  I, who have hardly hung up my own nightgown for years, and whose knowledge of housekeeping is mightily near zero, am to try to make home happy and comfortable for an artist!  Poor Dicky!

I don’t know what has come to me.  I worship Dicky.  He sweeps me off my feet with his love, his vivid personality overpowers my more commonplace self, but through all the bewildering intoxication of my engagement and marriage a little mocking devil, a cool, cynical, little devil, is constantly whispering in my ear:  “You fool, you fool, to imagine you can escape unhappiness!  There is no such thing as a happy marriage!”