As for Isabel—what she didn’t know includes almost the whole range of human knowledge. The puzzle is to find out what she _did_ know. She didn’t even know how to buy her own clothes—Ma Hartly had always done that for her. Among the things she did not know, were: How babies are made and come; how to make love; how to pretend she was enjoying it even when she wasn’t; how to sew, wash, cook, scrub, run a house, purchase provisions, keep household accounts, domineer over a housemaid, order a dinner, dismiss a cook, know when a room was clean, manage George Augustus when he was in a bad temper, give George Augustus a pill when he was liverish, feed and wash a baby and pin on its napkins, pay and receive calls, knit, crochet, make pastry, how to tell a fresh herring is stale, the difference between pork and veal, never to use margarine, how to make a bed comfortably, look after her health especially in pregnancy, produce the soft answer which turneth away wrath, keep the home fires burning, and an infinity of other things indispensable to a married woman. (I really wonder how poor old George managed to get born at all.) On the other hand both George Augustus and Isabel knew how to read and write, pray, eat, drink, wash themselves and dress up on Sundays. They were both pretty well acquainted with the Bible and Hymns A. and M. And then they had luv. They “luved” each other. Luv was enough, luv covered a multitude of ignorances, luv would provide, luv would strew their path with roses and primroses. Luv and God. Failing Luv there was God, and failing God there was Luv. I suppose, orthodoxly, God ought to come first, but in an 1890 marriage there was such a lot of Luv and God that there was no room for common sense, or common sex knowledge, or any of the knowledge we vile modern decadents think necessary in men and women. Sweet Isabel, dear George Augustus! They were _so_ young, _so_ innocent, _so_ pure. And what hell do you think is befitting the narrow-minded, slush-gutted, bug-whiskered or jet-bonneted he- and she-hypocrites, who sent them to their doom? O Timon, Timon, had I thy rhetoric! Who dares, who dares, in purity of manhood stand upright, and say.... Let me not rave, sweet gods, let me not rave. * * * * * The honeymoon did not take place in Paris or on the Plains of Waterloo, but in a South Coast watering place, a sweetly pretty spot Isabel had always wanted to visit. They had a ten mile drive from the village to the railway, and a two hours journey in a train which stopped at every station. They arrived tired, shy and disappointed, at the small but respectable hotel where a double-room had been booked.