“I see.  If there are to be many of these remarkable transformations of Anne, I shall have all the excitement of polygamy without its drawbacks.”

“You will.  And it’s the same for her, remember.  You’re a strange man.  You’ve just been introduced, you know—­by me—­and you’re begging for the pleasure of the first waltz, and Anne pretends that her programme is full, and you look over her shoulder and see that it isn’t, and that she puts you down for all the nice ones.  And you sit out all the rest, and you flirt on the stairs, and take her in to supper, and, finally, you know, you pull yourself together and you do it—­in the conservatory.  Oh, it’ll be so amusing, and so funny to watch.  You’ll begin by being most awfully polite to each other.”

“I suppose I may yet be permitted to call this strange young lady Anne?”

“Yes.  That’s because you remember that you have known her once before, a very long time ago, when you were children.  You are children, both of you.  Oh, Walter, I believe you’re looking forward to it; I believe you’re glad you’ve got to do it all over again.”

“Yes, Edie, I positively believe I am.”

He rose, laughing, prepared to begin that minute his new wooing of Anne.

“Good-bye,” said Edith, “it is good-bye, you know, and good luck to you.”

This time she knew that she had been wise for him.

Anne would have been horrified if she had known that the situation, so terrible for her, was developing for her husband certain possibilities of charm.  His irrepressible boyishness refused to accept it in all its moral gloom.  There were, he perceived, advantages in these strained relations.  They had removed Anne into the mysterious realm her maidenhood had inhabited, before marriage had had time to touch her magic.  She had become once more the unapproachable and unattained.  Their first courtship, pursued under intolerable restrictions of time and place, had been a rather uninspired affair, and its end a foregone conclusion.  He had been afraid of himself, afraid sometimes of her.  For he had not brought her the spontaneous, unalarmed, unspoiled spirit of his youth.  He had come to her with a stain on his imagination and a wound in his memory.  And she was holy to him.  He had held himself in, lest a touch, a word, a gesture should recall some insufferable association.

Marriage had delivered him from the tyranny of reminiscence.  No reminiscence could stand before the force of passion in possession.  It purified; it destroyed; it built up in three days its own inviolable memory.

And Anne, with the best will in the world, had had no power to undo its work in him.

In herself, too, below her kindling spiritual consciousness, in the unexplored depth and darkness of her, its work remained.