Her money affairs were still in a bad way. There had been expensive house repairing; there had been clothes for the children and Cecily could not bear to put them into cheaper things than they had been accustomed to wear. The fact that money which she would not use had been put to her credit made the situation half-ridiculous. She was conscious of looking a little ridiculous. As the standards for marriage which she had held so sacredly grew a little less rigid because of her friendliness with Della, she used to wonder more and more why she had let things matter so much between herself and Dick. So many things might have been passed over. “But I wouldn’t like to live like Della,” she’d tell herself. “It’s all right for Della to squabble and caress; our marriage was different.” And back again she would come to the old point that Dick had preferred casual amusements to her, that he had not been willing to concede that hers was the highest way. Though she might concede some things she was still sure of one fact: that hers was the highest way. It wasn’t, she would tell herself in these intense mental discussions, that she wanted Dick to stay in every night, that she didn’t want him to dance--to play. She only wanted him to stand with her mentally on a height of marriage to which they had attained at least in those early days; she didn’t want their union to mix on a common basis with these haphazard marriages of passion, of convenience, marriages of deliberate childlessness--which she saw around her. How he was to express his mental agreement with her she didn’t know; how he could have expressed it she could dream; but she knew that he never could feel or express it now. For they had put themselves in the quarreling class. Even if they lived together again they could not get the perfection they had missed. Resentment would be casting shadows between them for a while and, when resentment died at last, with it would die some delicacies, some memories. When the memories of these months of bitterness and separation faded, were they together or apart, some capacities for feeling would have faded, too. And yet the bond remained between them. After she had proved to herself that living with Dick now would be an admission of failure, her mental house of cards always tumbled. During the night she would waken and be looking into blackness, clearly conscious that her marriage was as alluring and commanding as ever, facing simple, elemental lonelinesses and desires. Rightness and wrongness of the issues did not matter much in these moments; in so far as they did it occurred to her that her little unbending scrupulosities about standards cut shabby figures besides unscrupulous, unprejudiced love. Even if he had been faithless--even if there had been another woman whom he loved--even then the bond would have remained. It was cemented in her soul by her memories--in her outer life by her children. She was almost ready for her half-loaf.