Gerald's friends and relations were all very nice to her and all very charming people. She had never, she thought, met so many people at once to whom the term might be applied. Their way of dressing, their way of talking, their way of taking you, themselves, and everything so easily, seemed as nearly perfect, as an example of human achievement, as could well be. Life passed among them would assuredly be a life of gliding along a sunny, unruffled stream. If there were dark things or troubled things to deal with, they were kept well below the shining surface; on the surface one always glided. It was charming, indeed, and yet Althea looked a little dizzily from side to side, as if at familiar but unattainable shores, and wondered if some solid foothold on solid earth were not preferable. She wondered if she would not rather walk than glide, and under the gliding she caught glimpses, now and then, of her own dark wonders. They were all very nice to her; but it was as Gerald's wife that they were nice to her; she herself counted for nothing with them. They were frivolous people for the most part, though some among them were serious, and often the most frivolous were those from whom she would have expected gravity, and the serious those whom, on a first meeting, she had thought perturbingly frivolous. Some of the political friends--one who was in the Cabinet, for instance--seemed to think more about hunting and bridge than about their functions in the State; while an aunt of Gerald's, still young and very pretty, wrote articles on philosophy and was ardently interested in ethical societies, in spite of the fact that she rouged her cheeks, wore clothes so fashionable as to look recondite, and had a reputation perfectly presentable for social uses, but not exempt from private whispers. Althea caught such whispers with particular perturbation. The question of morals was one that she had imagined herself to face with a cosmopolitan tolerance; but she now realised that to live among people whose code, in this respect, seemed one of manners only, was a very different thing from reading about them or seeing them from afar, as it were, in foreign countries. Gerald's friends and relatives were anything rather than Bohemian, and most of them were flawlessly respectable; but they were also anything but unworldly; they were very worldly, and, from the implied point of view of all of them, what didn't come out in the world it didn't concern anybody to recognise--except in whispers. It all resolved itself, in the case of people one disapproved of, into a faculty for being nice to them without really having anything to do with them; and to poor Althea this was a difficult task to undertake; social life, in her experience, was more involved in the life of the affections and matched it more nearly. She found, when the fortnight was over, that she was glad, very glad, to get away to Merriston. The comparative solitude would do her good, she