The next morning Grace Travers woke up rather earlier than usual. The scene of the previous evening had left a distinct memory behind, although it had ended in a reconciliation. She had exchanged a few sentences with Lord Kirkdale, and there was an air of truth, candour, and unsophistication that appealed strongly to her imagination, as a contrast to her husband’s somewhat brutal analysis of sexual relations. A civilised woman has very little taste for what may be termed pure passion; it pleases her instinct perhaps, but it revolts her intellect, her imagination, her delicacy, her pride. To an intellectual person the whole business of love-making is ridiculous, and without dignity. Dreams and fancies are invoked to give it an adventitious interest, and so a sort of mesmerism is exercised, and blissful dreams of eternal happiness come into existence, depending for their duration very much upon the sympathy between the imaginations of the lovers, which sometimes is powerful enough to build up a reality from a vision. However this may be, when love comes in at the door intellect flies out of the window or sleeps the sleep of the disgusted. When it returns to its habitation it delivers stern judgment on the follies that have been committed in its absence. Now a lovers’ quarrel interferes considerably with the glamour of the situation, it disturbs the harmony which is essential to the conditions described, and the intellect takes the chance to slip in and give an opinion. So it happened to Grace. She was clever, and before the madness came over her (for in her case it was not a sympathetic imagination which attracted her) was considered witty and brilliant. But the first effect of her love was to make her take life very, very seriously; she became quite incapable, for a time, of seeing the humour of any situation. She had hitherto led a wild roving life, and her ideal had been to settle down in a little nest of her own and play Joan to George Travers’s Darby for the rest of her life. Now Travers did not particularly object to her playing Joan, but he did find himself unequal to the combined _rôles_ of Romeo and Darby. Romance and domesticity are not a very suitable combination, and poor Travers may perhaps be forgiven for falling short of the ideal set before him. As has been said by a lady who has made some study of the female heart: ‘What is really necessary to a woman’s happiness is two husbands, one for everyday and one for Sundays.’ She really meant that she has discovered that Romeo and Darby cannot be combined in one poor mortal man, so is willing to take them separately. Grace was not so reasonable. The romantic attachment she had formed for Romeo, in the person of Travers, prevented her enduring the presence of Darby, in the person of Kirkdale. She did not object to Darby’s homage, but it was certainly not worth thinking of, and would certainly meet with no reward from her hands.