"Oh, no you wouldn't!" said her mother, with a bitter little inflection. "They all talk that way. Girls all feel so, if they know enough to feel at all--to think at all. They rage and wear out their nerves--as you are doing now, heaven knows why--and the beloved husband calls a doctor and buys sweets and travels with the precious invalid, and never once suspects that he is at the bottom of the whole trouble. It never dawns upon him that what she is dying for is a real and loyal companionship, such as she had fondly dreamed of, and not at all for sea air. It doesn't enter his mind that she feels humiliated because she knows that a great part of his life is a sealed book to her, and that he wishes to keep it so." She paused, and her daughter stroked her cheek. This was indeed a revelation to the girl. She had been wholly deceived by her mother's gay manner all these years. She was taking herself sharply to task now. "But by and by when she succeeds in killing all her self-respect; when she makes up her mind that the case is hopeless, and that she must expect absolutely no frankness in life beyond the limits of conventional usage prescribed for purblind babies; after she arrives at the point where she discovers that her happiness is a pretty fiction built on air foundation--well, daughter, after that she--she strives to murder all that is in her beyond and above the petty simpleton she passes for--and she succeeds fairly well, doesn't she?" There was a cynical smile on her lips, and she made an elaborate bow to her daughter. "Oh, mamma, I beg your pardon!" exclaimed the girl, almost frightened. "I truly beg your pardon! If--you--I--" Her mother looked steadily out of the window. Then she said, slowly, "How did you come to find all this out _before_ you were married, child? Have I not done a mother's duty by you in keeping you in ignorance, so far as I could, of all the struggles and facts of life--of--" The bitter tone was in her voice again. Gertrude was hurt by it, it was so full of self-reproach mingled with self-contempt. She slipped her arm about her mother's waist. "Don't, mamma," she said. "Don't blame yourself like that. I'm sure you have always done the best possible--the--" Her mother laughed, but the note was not pleasant. "Yes, I always did the lady-like thing,--nothing. I floated with the tide. Take my advice, daughter,--float. If you don't, you'll only tire yourself trying to swim against a tide that is too strong for you and--and nothing will come of it. Nothing at all." The girl began to protest with the self-confidence of youth, but her mother went on. She had taken the bit in her teeth to-day and meant to run the whole race.