“I’d love to be commonplace, just for once. It wouldn’t go against your convictions to let me be commonplace when I was dead. If one does die! I shall come back every spring. When everything is bursting with life, how could I be expected to lie still? Ah! I wish you were not so uncomfortably original. I’d like to be like other people.” “Other people being--the majority, that is----” “Fools! Yes, I know. I agree. I’m a good wife. I take my color from my husband. But I do not think you sufficiently appreciate the tremendous importance of fools. They rule the world, with a very few exceptions. There is one born every minute. Think of that! And yet you ignore this vast army. It is created for the comfort, the convenience of the occasional wise man. But you are not wise. You do nothing for the fool. You won’t even paint pictures for him to hang on his wall; that is why we are so hard up. The fool does not want your mystic, impressionist pictures; they worry and irritate him. Never mind. Be sure you put it in the paper--Adeline, wife of James Pray.” “Jump up from the grass,” he cried sharply--the sharpness with which husbands of some years’ standing veil concern--“and don’t talk nonsense. You’ll take cold.” “Pooh! What is health to a new spring gown? That sounds like a patent-medicine query--inverted,” she said idly. They had been to the river to gather flowering rushes, and had been caught in a shower. It was a wet summer, one of those years when you hear the continual soft rushing of rain and when the plants in the garden go to luxuriant leaf. She sat under the tree. She had taken off her hat and was holding it carefully in her lap. She had pulled the skirt of her gown over her bodice and held it, lining outward, round her head and shoulders. Her knees were drawn to her chin, and her chin rested in the scooped hollows of her hands. “These queer colors that you like run dreadfully,” she complained. “Why did you wear a new dress on a threatening afternoon?” “Because it is Bank Holiday. I have an ineradicable Bank Holiday instinct for new clothes and an outing. This dress will be spoiled. I’d like a navy-blue serge coat and skirt--you’d never permit it. Blue serge--especially when it is touched up with cardinal--sounds so safe, so sane; it seems to shout of all the good, thrifty, respectable women who do their duty. Blue serge and a sailor hat!” James Pray looked down at her tenderly and yet with a masculine intolerance of her nonsense. How is it that I know so much--the very details of their looks and words? In after days--when Adeline and Murphy were dead--Pray used to talk of her by the hour, and bore me to death.