Katie coloured a little.--"I liked 'Barrage' awfully at the time," she confessed, "but--," and she cheered up again, "--I _hate_ it now." "But did her work--what's the expression?--fill her life?" Here Dorothy answered for Katie.--"I think she rather liked the fame part of it," she said slowly. "Does she paint now?" "Very little, I think, Lady Tasker." "Has her children to look after, I suppose?" "Well--she has both a nurse and a governess----" "They're quite well off, aren't they? I seem to remember that Pratt came into quite a lot." "They seem to spend a great deal." "But that's only a small house of theirs?" "Oh, yes, they're rather proud of that. They don't spend their money selfishly. It goes to the Cause, you see." "What Cause?" Lady Tasker asked abruptly. This was Katie's cue.... She ceased, and Lady Tasker muttered something. It sounded rather like "H'm! Too much money and not enough to do!" but neither of her companions was near enough to be quite sure. And thereupon the questions stopped. But a surmise of their drift had begun to dawn glimmeringly upon Dorothy. She ceased to hear the exposition of Imperialism's real needs into which Katie presently launched, and fell into a meditation. And of that meditation this was about the length and breadth:-- Until the law should allow a man to have more wives than one (if then), of course only one woman in the world could be perfectly happy--the woman who had Stan. That conviction came first, and last, and ran throughout her meditation. And of what Dorothy might compassionately have called secondary happinesses she had hitherto not thought very much. She had merely thanked her stars that she had not married a man like Cosimo, had once or twice rather resented Amory's well-meant but left-handed kindnesses, and that had been the extent of her concern about the Pratt household. But first Katie, and now her aunt, had set her wondering hard enough about that household now. What, she asked herself, had the Pratts married on? What discoveries had they made in one another, what resources found within themselves? Apart from their talks and books and meetings and "interests" and that full pack of their theories, what was their marriage? Thrown alone together for an hour, did they fret? Did their yawning cease when the bell rang and a caller was admitted? Did even the same succession of callers become stale and a bore, so that strangers had to be sought to provide a stimulus? And did they call these and half a hundred other forms of mutual boredom by the rather resounding names that blabbing Katie had repeated to her--"wider interests," "the broad outlook," "the breaking down of personal insularity," and the rest?