Mrs. Hurst was finding it more and more difficult to face her husband. Something which was becoming chronic in his manner aroused a suspicious protest in her. When, in the morning, he entered the breakfast room and found her already seated at the table, she bit her lips, and between her brows appeared a little invariable frown. Charles was a mystery to her. She wanted him to be a mystery. The thing she had to fight against most was the recognition of his obviousness. A child! A ridiculous grown-up child! Quite incomprehensible. And when her reflections culminated too logically she put them aside with an emphasis on "the sacredness of sex". There were flirtations, trivial improprieties, she knew, and she admitted them. Perhaps all men were like that, spiritually so immature. But where the flesh impinged upon her dream there was only an excited darkness in which she defiantly closed her eyes. "Mrs. Wilson is going out to Marburne this week, Charles. She's organizing a distributing center for the country women. They are quite out of touch with the city markets and some of them make such wonderful things--jams and embroideries, needlework and the like. She's trying to get coöperation from other people who summer there. She wants to build an industrial school for the girls, and is willing to put up a third of the necessary money if others will contribute the rest. She wants me to go out there with her and speak in various country schools." Catherine was resisting the conviction that something critical was occurring in her husband's inner life. The idea of going away from the city, and leaving him, in such a state, to his own devices, frightened her. To admit the necessity of remaining, however, was to concede the existence of an issue. When he looked at her, it was as if he said, I'm like this, but I can't help it, so forgive me. She did not wish to know what that look meant. For years she had warded off crises by merely ignoring their imminence. She dared not abandon the serviceable belief that the disturbing elements of life cease to confuse us if we refuse to admit that they exist. She called this, Rising above our lower selves. There is so much truth, you know, in the religions of the Orient. At the same time, Catherine's transcendental generalizations did not save her from bitterness. Life was difficult, and Charles had left her more than her share of responsibility for its solution. Charles regarded his wife wistfully, almost sentimentally. He made a good-humored grimace. "Mrs. Wilson going to carry sweetness and light to Marburne, is she?" He was crumbling bread between his blunt unsteady fingers, and scattering it on the table cloth. What was he thinking of? Catherine smiled at him, a perplexed resentful smile, a trifle hard. He was unhappy before her. There was something cold and watchful half-hidden in her eyes beneath her pleasantly wrinkled lids. "Mrs. Wilson is a very valuable, capable woman."