“No, madam. Nouna is my wife, that is enough for me. I only want you to understand that she must be content to live for a few years like a poor officer’s wife, some day she shall have as much rank and position as she could wish.” “Oh, that would be charming for you; but Nouna! Do you think she is the sort of girl to be happy by herself in stuffy lodgings while you are amusing yourself ‘getting on’? Come, you know better. If she couldn’t be contented like that during her honeymoon, do you think she could now?” The bitterness of this thrust, to which experience had given a barbed point, made him wince. “She is only a child,” said he; “feeling my love about her day by day, she will learn to be happy in that, as you would have been if your husband had been all your heart wanted,” he added, as a happy thought. But Chloris White only laughed, having the coarse cynical honesty of her kind. “Do you really believe that?” she said. “Well, you are wrong. In my case, because no one man could ever have been to me all my heart wanted; in Nouna’s case, because she is, disguise it what way you like, her mother’s child. Give her jewels, new gowns, gaiety, luxury, and you may hold what room there is in her heart for a man; shut her in two rooms, restrict her to one frock for each of the seasons, and you will see, if you don’t know, just how much happiness your love is able to give her. I tell you she must have pleasure, pleasure, pleasure; and if you won’t let her accept it openly, passing through your hands as a gift from you, I’ll let her have it secretly through somebody else’s.” A spirit of evil seemed to flash a hideous lightning across her handsome face as she uttered this threat. George was horrorstruck. “You don’t mean what you say,” he said, catching his breath. “You, who were noble enough to keep apart from your child for her sake! You would not destroy your own work now!”