“It has an air,” he explained, “quite too much of the Sunday. I want to eradicate it! A tranquil hat afflicts me! It has no power to move the heart. In a hat, one should have peril. It should not be an accident, I admit many are! But it should have an intention with a hint of danger. Pass me the scissors.” Rose passed him the scissors. “I hope,” she ventured, “that Monsieur Gérard hadn’t anything dreadful to say.” She thought it couldn’t have been very dreadful, for Léon was looking distinctly pleased. However, he put a decent amount of gravity into the headshake with which he answered her. “Everything is of the most complicated,” he assured her. “The affair Gérard has literally come to pieces. The marriage has as little integrity as the inside of a volcano. They walk on broken glass. It is no longer a honeymoon--it is an inferno!” Rose cried out in horror. “But what has happened to them?” she asked anxiously. “It is a long story,” said Léon, who had by now completely unpicked her hat and was trying the trimming upside down, and rather liking the effect. “But I shall tell you as much as I can. One must make the troubles of others one’s own--must we not? Both our religions agree upon that. _Non?_ “It appears, in the first instance, the marriage was of Madame’s making. “She had the idea--common to many women--that she was born to be the wife of a great artist. As a matter of fact, no women are born for that, because no great artist should have a wife. They should have from time to time a tragic union with a mistress--that develops them; wives do not. Raoul was the only artist Madame knew. She was twenty-three, an heiress, and as you see for yourself a charming little woman of the world. She made a good impression upon Raoul. He discovered that marriage with her would have a solid foundation. Now he has got it and naturally he does not know what to do with it. Above all he finds that Madame considers herself ill-used. She is, as I told you before, romantic. She expected a grand passion, she knew him capable of one, but she did not grasp that it could never be in her direction. “I find it myself a little bourgeois of her to expect Raoul to develop such a thing for a wife. Do not look so like the Sunday hat, dear Rose! Remember their marriage was a French one. Ours is English--therefore we were in love. Still, of course, both were marriages!” Léon manipulated the hat afresh, it was beginning to look less and less like Sunday. Rose said nothing. She had a silly feeling that if she spoke she might cry. She was very sorry for Madame Gérard. “That, then, is the grievance of Madame,” Léon went on. “She is young, excitable and disappointed. You have that on one side. I must say that I think she lacks management, but for all that one sympathizes with her.