Finally, Lily remarked that it was a beautiful night, and it was as exactly what might have been expected from her flower-like lips as the squeaking call for mamma of a talking doll. George almost grunted a response, and rattled his paper loudly. Lily looked at him with a little surprise, but with unfailing love and admiration. George had sometimes a feeling that if he were to beat her she would continue to admire him and think it lovely of him. Lily had, in fact, the soul of an Oriental woman in the midst of New England. She would have figured admirably in a harem. George, being Occidental to his heart's core, felt an exasperation the worse because it was needfully dumb, on account of this adoration. He thought less of himself because his wife thought he could do no wrong. The power of doing wrong is, after all, a power, and George had a feeling of having lost that power and of being in a negative way wronged. Finally he spoke crossly to Lily over his newspaper. "Why do you stick so to that everlasting fancy-work?" said he. "Why on earth don't you sometimes run out of an evening? You never go into the next house nowadays." Lily arose directly. "We will go over there now if you wish," said she. She laid down her work and smoothed her hair with her doll-like gesture, which never varied. George looked at her surlily and irresolutely. "No, I guess we had better not to-night," he said. "I had just as lief, dear." George rose, letting his paper slide to the floor. "Well," he said, "they are all out on the front door-step, and I think some of the neighbors are there, too. We might run over a moment. It is too hot to stay in the house, anyway." But when George and Lily came alongside the Stillman house the laughter was hushed, and there was a light in Aunt Maria's bedroom, and lights also in the chambers behind the drawn curtains. "We are too late," said George. "They have gone to bed." "I think they have," replied Lily, looking up at the lighted bedroom windows. Then she added, "I will go over there any evening you wish, dear," and looked at him with that unfailing devotion which unreasonably angered him. He answered her quite roughly, and was ashamed of himself afterwards. "It is a frightfully monotonous life we lead anyhow," said he, as if she, Lily, were responsible for it. "Suppose we go away a week somewhere next month," said Lily. "Well, I'll think of it," said he, striding along by her side. Even that suggestion, which was entirely reasonable, angered him, and he felt furious and ashamed of himself for being so angered. Lily was constantly making him ashamed of himself for not being a god and for feeling unreasonable anger when she did nothing to provoke it. Once in a while a man likes to have a reasonable cause for resentment in order to prove himself in the right. "Well, I am ready to go whenever you wish to do so, dear," said Lily. "My wardrobe is in order."