“But one can always do something if it’s only to scream,” rejoined Gabriella with spirit.

“I wouldn’t scream,” replied Jane, while the pale cast of resolution hardened her small flat features, “not—­not if he killed me.  My one comfort,” she added pathetically, “is that only you and mother know how he treats me.”

Her pretty vacant face with its faded bloom resembled a pastel portrait in which the artist had forgotten to paint an expression.  “Poor Jane Gracey,” as she was generally called, had wasted the last ten years in a futile effort to hide the fact of an unfortunate marriage beneath an excessively cheerful manner.  She talked continually because talking seemed to her the most successful way of “keeping up an appearance.”  Though everybody who knew her knew also that Charley Gracey neglected her shamefully, she spent twelve hours of the twenty-four pretending that she was perfectly happy.  At nineteen she had been a belle and beauty of the willowy sort; but at thirty she had relapsed into one of the women whom men admire in theory and despise in reality.  She had started with a natural tendency to clinging sweetness; as the years went on the sweetness, instead of growing fainter, had become almost cloying, while the clinging had hysterically tightened into a clutch.  Charley Gracey, who had married her under the mistaken impression that her type was restful for a reforming rake, (not realizing that there is nothing so mentally disturbing as a fool) had been changed by marriage from a gay bird of the barnyard into a veritable hawk of the air.  His behaviour was the scandal of the town, yet the greater his sins, the intenser grew Jane’s sweetness, the more twining her hold.  “Nobody will ever think of blaming you, darling,” said Mrs. Carr consolingly.  “You have behaved beautifully from the beginning.  We all know what a perfect wife you have been.”

“I’ve tried to do my duty even if Charley failed in his,” replied the perfect wife, unfastening the hooks of her small heliotrope wrap trimmed with tarnished silver passementerie.  Above her short flaxen “bang” she wore a crumpled purple hat ornamented with bunches of velvet pansies; and though it was two years old, and out of fashion at a period when fashions changed less rapidly, it lent an air of indecent festivity to her tearful face.  Her youth was already gone, for her beauty had been of the fragile kind that breaks early, and her wan, aristocratic features had settled into the downward droop which comes to the faces of people who habitually “expect the worst.”

“I know, Jane, I know,” murmured Mrs. Carr, dropping her thimble as she nervously tried to hasten her sewing.  “But don’t you think it would be a comfort, dear, to have the advice of a man about Charley?  Won’t you let me send Marthy for your Cousin Jimmy Wrenn?”

“Oh, mother, I couldn’t.  It would kill me to have everybody know I’m unhappy!” wailed Jane, breaking down.