Mrs. Maynard took the little puncture in good part. “Oh, yes, George and I have had a good deal of light let in on us. I don’t suppose my character was much changed _outwardly_ in my sickness,” she suggested. “It was _not_,” answered Grace warmly. “It was intensified, that was all.” Mrs. Maynard laughed in her turn, with real enjoyment of the conception. “Well, I wasn’t going to let on, unless it came to the worst; I didn’t say much, but I kept up an awful thinking. It would have been easy enough to get a divorce, and George wouldn’t have opposed it; but I looked at it in this way: that the divorce wouldn’t have put us back where we were, anyway, as I had supposed it would. We had broken into each other’s lives, and we couldn’t get out again, with all the divorces under the sun. That’s the worst of getting married: you break into each other’s lives. You said something like it to me, that day when you came back from your sail with Walter Libby. And I just concluded that there couldn’t be any trial that wouldn’t be a great deal easier to bear than getting rid of all your trials; and I just made up my mind that if any divorce was to be got, George Maynard might get it himself; a temporary separation was bad enough for me, and I told him so, about the first words I could speak. And we’re going to try the new departure on that platform. We don’t either of us suspect we can have things perfectly smooth, but we’ve agreed to rough it together when we can’t. We’ve found out that we can’t marry and then become single, any more than we could die and come to life again. And don’t you forget it, Grace! You don’t half know yourself, now. You know what you have been; but getting married lets loose all your possibilities. You don’t know what a temper you’ve got, nor how badly you can behave—how much like a naughty, good-for-nothing little girl; for a husband and wife are just two children together: that’s what makes the sweetness of it, and that’s what makes the dreadfulness. Oh, _you’ll_ have need of all your good principles, I can tell you, and if you’ve a mind to do anything practical in the way of high purposes, I reckon there’ll be use for them all.”