“I know,” she said eagerly. “That’s just it; if Fred did care like that, oh dear, how wonderful it would be! But he doesn’t. I don’t really exist for him at all. He thinks so much about his books and the people in them that real people aren’t there. At first I thought that I could help him with his work, read to him and discuss it with him; and I know that there were a lot of grammatical mistakes, but he wouldn’t let me do anything. He shut me out. I was no use to him at all.” She clenched her hands and frowned. As a matter of fact she got on with him very well, but they had quarrelled that morning, over nothing at all, of course. And then it made things more exciting if you thought that you hated your husband, and Mr. Maradick was a fine-looking man. And he thought how young she was and what a dreary stretch of years was before her. He knew what his own married life had been: fifteen years of disillusion and misunderstanding and sullen silence. “I am so sorry,” he said, and he looked at her very sympathetically. “I can understand a little how hard it is. We don’t all of us make lucky shots, but then we have just got to grin and bear it; cold sort of comfort, I know, and if it really does comfort you to feel that you have a friend you may count on me.” She liked his sympathy, the dear old strong thing! and at any rate she would pull Fred pretty sharply out of his books for once. Captain Stanton and Mr. Stapylton had had just that effect; she had never known Fred so charming as he was after their final exit. He looked down at her with a fatherly smile. “We’ll be friends,” he said. “It’s perfectly sweet of you,” she said, her voice trembling a little. “I felt that you would understand. I cannot tell you how it has helped me, this little talk of ours. Now I suppose we ought to be going back or they’ll be wondering where we are.” And he stood thanking God for a wonderful world. At last there were people who wanted him, Tony and Mrs. Lester; and at the same time he had begun to see everything with new eyes. It was his view! They talked of life being over at forty; why, it had never begun for him until now! They walked back to the tent, and he talked to her gravely about helping others and the real meaning of life. “He can,” she thought, “be most awfully dull, but he’s a dear old thing.”