Generations of unquestioning wives behind her, she sternly routed the unbidden doubts, she deliberately put from her thoughts many another disillusion as the days went by.  She was a married woman now, protected and busy; she must not dream like a romantic girl.  There was delightfully novel cooking to do; there was freedom from hateful business responsibility.  All beginnings were hard, she told her shrinking soul; she was herself changed by the years; what wonder that Wallace was changed?

Perhaps in his case it was less change than the logical development of qualities that would have been distinctly discernible to clearer eyes than hers in the very hour of their meeting.  Wallace had always drifted with the current, as he was drifting now.  He would have been as glad as she, had success come instead of failure; he did not even now habitually neglect his work, nor habitually drink.  It was merely that his engagement was much less distinguished than he had told her it was, his part was smaller, his pay smaller, and his chances of promotion lessening with every year.  He had never been a student of life, nor interested in anything that did not touch his own comfort; but in the first days of their love, days of youth and success and plenty, Martie had been as frankly an egotist as he.  His heaviness, his lack of interest in what excited her, his general unresponsiveness, came to her now more as a recollection than a surprise.

The farce in which he had a part really did prove fairly successful, and his salary was steady and his hours comfortable until after the new year.  Then the run ended, and Wallace drifted for three or four weeks that were full of deep anxiety for Martie.

When he was engaged again, in a vaudeville sketch that was booked for a few weeks on one of the smaller circuits about New York, she had some difficulty in making him attend rehearsals, and take his part seriously.  His friends were generally of the opinion that it was beneath his art.  His wife urged that “it might lead to something.”

Wallace was amused at her concern.  Actors never worked the whole year round, he assured her.  There was nothing doing in the summertime, ever.  Martie remarked, with a half-sorry laugh, that a salary of one hundred dollars a week for ten weeks was less than eighty-five dollars a month, and the same salary, if drawn for only five weeks, came to something less than a living income.

“Don’t worry!” Wallace said.

“Wallace, it’s not for myself.  It’s for the—­the children.  My dear!  If it wasn’t for that, it would be a perfect delight to me to take luck just as it came, go to Texas or Canada with you, work up parts myself!” she would answer eagerly.  She wanted to be a good wife to him, to give him just what all men wanted in their wives.  But under all her bravery lurked a sick sense of defeat.  He never knew how often he failed her.