Her thoughts were long-distance wires, as the thoughts of the sick are, and they covered the spaces of ether and of earth that afternoon--the unexplored wastes into which the soul invites no fellow-traveler. Her heart fled to the rose-red star of their early dream. They had loved as the young and the well, the brave and the bright, may love; passionately, as the brown and the blond do; and reasonably, as the well-mated and the fortunate can. They were of the same age, the same class, the same traditions; they knew the same people, who congratulated them in the same words; they had inherited the same ideals of life, and went buoyantly into it. Not so much as a fad had inserted itself between their tastes, and in their convictions they were mercifully not divided. At first their only hardship had been the strenuous denial of the professional life; but she never wished him to make money--she was quite happy to put up muslin curtains at twelve and a half cents a yard, while her friends hung lace at twenty dollars a window--and had flung herself into the political economy of their household with a merry and ingenious enthusiasm, which she wore as charmingly as she did the blond colors, the blue, the lavender, the rose, the corn, over which she strained her honest eyes and bent her straight shoulders to save dressmakers' bills. Since she had been ill she had tried--how hard no man could ever understand--not to grow careless about her dress. "The daintiest invalid I ever knew," Dr. Thorne used to say. Marshall cared a good deal about such matters, was fastidious over a wrinkle, was sure to observe a spot or a blemish, while the immaculate might pass unnoticed for weeks; disliked old dresses; when she had a new one on he admired her as if she were a new wife, for a day or two. She was full of pretty little womanly theories about retaining her husband's devotion.... When had it begun to flag? She had made a science of wifehood, and applied it with a delicate art.... Why had it failed? ... No, no, no! Not _that_! Not that word, _yet_! Say rather, why had it faltered? With a tremulous modesty characteristic of her sweet nature, she scored herself for the disillusions of her married life, as if somehow the fault were hers. How had it all come about? Was she fretful with the first baby? It seemed to have begun (if she thought very hard about it) with the first baby. She knew she had faded a little then. Pink was a crying baby. "I lost so much sleep! And it makes one look so, about the eyes. And then, as Marshall says, maternity affects the complexion."