“Oh, Howard, I do like it,” she cried, in a desperate attempt—­which momentarily came near succeeding to convince herself that she could have desired nothing more.  “It’s so sweet and clean and new—­and all our own.”

She succeeded, at any rate, in convincing Howard.  In certain matters, he was easily convinced.

“I thought you’d be pleased when you saw it, my dear,” he said.

CHAPTER III

THE GREAT UNATTACHED

It was the poet Cowper who sang of domestic happiness as the only bliss that has survived the Fall.  One of the burning and unsolved questions of to-day is,—­will it survive the twentieth century?  Will it survive rapid transit and bridge and Woman’s Rights, the modern novel and modern drama, automobiles, flying machines, and intelligence offices; hotel, apartment, and suburban life, or four homes, or none at all?  Is it a weed that will grow anywhere, in a crevice between two stones in the city?  Or is it a plant that requires tender care and the water of self-sacrifice?  Above all, is it desirable?

Our heroine, as may have been suspected, has an adaptable temperament.  Her natural position is upright, but like the reed, she can bend gracefully, and yields only to spring back again blithely.  Since this chronicle regards her, we must try to look at existence through her eyes, and those of some of her generation and her sex:  we must give the four years of her life in Rivington the approximate value which she herself would have put upon it—­which is a chapter.  We must regard Rivington as a kind of purgatory, not solely a place of departed spirits, but of those which have not yet arrived; as one of the many temporary abodes of the Great Unattached.

No philosophical writer has as yet made the attempt to define the change —­as profound as that of the tadpole to the frog—­between the lover and the husband.  An author of ideals would not dare to proclaim that this change is inevitable:  some husbands—­and some wives are fortunate enough to escape it, but it is not unlikely to happen in our modern civilization.  Just when it occurred in Howard Spence it is difficult to say, but we have got to consider him henceforth as a husband; one who regards his home as a shipyard rather than the sanctuary of a goddess; as a launching place, the ways of which are carefully greased, that he may slide off to business every morning with as little friction as possible, and return at night to rest undisturbed in a comfortable berth, to ponder over the combat of the morrow.

It would be inspiring to summon the vision of Honora, in rustling garments, poised as the figurehead of this craft, beckoning him on to battle and victory.  Alas! the launching happened at that grimmest and most unromantic of hours-ten minutes of eight in the morning.  There was a period, indeterminate, when she poured out his coffee with wifely zeal; a second period when she appeared at the foot of the stairs to kiss him as he was going out of the door; a third when, clad in an attractive dressing-gown, she waved him good-by from the window; and lastly, a fourth, which was only marked by an occasional protest on his part, when the coffee was weak.