“I’d gladly come down, Howard, if it seemed to make the least difference to you,” said Honora.  “But all you do is to sit with your newspaper propped up and read the stock reports, and growl when I ask you a polite question.  You’ve no idea how long it makes the days out here, to get up early.”

“It seems to me you put in a good many days in town,” he retorted.

“Surely you don’t expect me to spend all my time in Rivington!” she cried reproachfully; “I’d die.  And then I am always having to get new cooks for you, because they can’t make Hollandaise sauce like hotel chefs.  Men have no idea how hard it is to keep house in the country,—­I just wish you had to go to those horrid intelligence offices.  You wouldn’t stay in Rivington ten days.  And all the good cooks drink.”

Howard, indeed, with the aid of the village policeman, had had to expel from his kitchen one imperious female who swore like a dock hand, and who wounded Honora to the quick by remarking, as she departed in durance, that she had always lived with ladies and gentlemen and people who were somebody.  The incident had tended further to detract from the romance of the country.

It is a mistake to suppose that the honeymoon disappears below the horizon with the rapidity of a tropical sun.  And there is generally an afterglow.  In spite of cooks and other minor clouds, in spite of visions of metropolitan triumphs (not shattered, but put away in camphor), life was touched with a certain novelty.  There was a new runabout and a horse which Honora could drive herself, and she went to the station to meet her husband.  On mild Saturday and Sunday afternoons they made long excursions, into the country—­until the golf season began, when the lessons begun at Silverdale were renewed.  But after a while certain male competitors appeared, and the lessons were discontinued.  Sunday, after his pile of newspapers had religiously been disposed of, became a field day.  Indeed, it is impossible, without a twinge of pity, to behold Howard taking root in Rivington, for we know that sooner or later he will be dug up and transplanted.  The soil was congenial.  He played poker on the train with the Rivington husbands, and otherwise got along with them famously.  And it was to him an enigma—­when occasionally he allowed his thoughts to dwell upon such trivial matters—­why Honora was not equally congenial with the wives.

There were, no doubt, interesting people in Rivington about whom many stories could be written:  people with loves and fears and anxieties and joys, with illnesses and recoveries, with babies, but few grandchildren.  There were weddings at the little church, and burials; there were dances at the golf club; there were Christmas trees, where most of the presents —­like Honora’s—­came from afar, from family centres formed in a social period gone by; there were promotions for the heads of families, and consequent rejoicings over increases of income; there were movings; there were—­inevitable in the ever grinding action of that remorseless law, the survival of the fittest—­commercial calamities, and the heartrending search for new employment.