Meanwhile, without waiting to “go up there and make sure,” two efforts on Mrs. Mar’s part to interest moneyed men in her husband’s discovery, resulted not alone in failing to convince any one else that this was a fine opportunity for investment, but ultimately in undermining her own faith. With the coming of her first child she prepared to cast overboard the wild hope (she saw now that it _was_ wild) of a fortune up yonder in the ice-fields, and showed herself wisely ready to make what she could out of the saner possibilities life presented in Valdivia. Her cousins had been right. She wouldn’t admit it to them—not yet—but it was a crazy scheme, that notion of gold in the arctic regions! Dreamer as he was, Mar missed nothing of the intended effect when she first ceased to talk about his discovery—ceased to plan all life with that fact for its corner-stone. Her initial silence hurt him probably more than the half-veiled taunts of a later time. It was all the difference between the shrinking of an open wound and the dull beating of an ancient cicatrice. Not only, as time went on, did she resent the illusion she had been under, but, as is common with women of her type, her husband’s greater significance since motherhood had come to her, made her increasingly dread that foolish infatuation of his. She foresaw that a continued faith in the value of his “find” would stand between him and energetic pursuit of fortune in any other direction. So it was that the North was not merely for her, as time went on, the type of a shattered dream—it came to be her and her babies’ rival in this man’s thoughts. This man—who owed to them all his thoughts, all his faith and energy—he was divided in his allegiance. And not in dreams alone might he desert them. He might even conceivably insist, against all rational advice and plain duty, he might insist on going back there! The mere idea of his fatuous clinging to the old plan came to exercise over her an almost uncanny power for misery. Not that he continued openly to admit his preoccupation. But it was there—she was sure of that—in his head, more properly in his heart, his refuge, his darling, his delight. She came to feel for it the hatred, and to have before it the involuntarily nerve recoil, that lies for some wives in the thought of another woman. What if she never succeeded in rooting the fancy out of his brain? How was she at least to make sure of preventing his squandering time and money in pursuit of it?—now, when she could not go too, and when his going would mean (as she honestly thought) disaster to her and to the children and the humiliation of falling back for cousinly help on those wise young Missourians, who had seen at once the madness of the scheme. She patched up the breach with her two kinsmen, and induced them to offer her husband a small position in their bank. _That_ would hold him.