But, as time went on, her temper was not always so sweet. Indeed, it ceased to be sweet. In his steady, rather bovine way, he loved her as much as ever; but his love of being with her was less great, and his pleasure in the society of others was greater, than of yore. Perhaps if Thia had borne a child, she might have been less troubled about the welfare of the homelanders. But this diversion and solace was not granted. Thia’s maternal instinct had to spend itself on a community which she could not help and did not now genuinely love, and on a husband who did not understand her simplest thoughts and was moreover growing fat. Her disposition suffered under the strain. One day, when she was talking to him about the homeland, she paused with sudden suspicion and asked him what she had said last; and he could make no answer; and she asked him to tell her what he had been thinking about; and he said that he had been thinking about his having slain the dragon; and she, instead of chiding him tenderly, as she would have done in the old days, screamed. She screamed that she would go mad if ever again he spoke to her of that old dragon. She flung her arms out towards the hills across the waters and said, with no lowering of her voice, that every day, out yonder, men were slaying dragons and thinking nothing of it, and doing their work, and not growing fat. He asked her whether she meant that he himself was growing fat. ‘Yea,’ she answered. He said that then indeed she was mad. Away he strode, nor did he return at sundown; and it was late in the night before the god retired from a cheery party of worshippers and went up to the cave, where Thia, faintly visible in the moonlight, lay sleeping, with a look of deep disdain on her face. * * * * * Sometimes Thia wondered whether in her childhood the characters and ways of the homelanders had been as they were now. She hated to think that they had not been perfect in those days; but she reasoned that they could not have been: before the coming of the dragon they must have been as they were now, and the only difference was that they had then loved her. Thus even the memory of her bright careless early years was embittered to her.