He is a Radical and she is Conservative, by education and upbringing. It hurts her when he argues with revolutionary ideas which seem to her positively wicked, and subversive of all morality. He has loose views about morality in general, and is very tolerant about lapses from the old-fashioned moral code. That hurts her too--horribly. It begins to undermine the foundations of her faith in what used to seem the essential truth of things. But, above all, it hurts her to realize that she and her husband are not one, in mind and body, but utterly different, in temperament, in their outlook on life, in their fundamental principles and ideas. On the other side the husband makes unpleasant discoveries. He finds out, with a shock, that he was utterly ignorant of the girl whom he asked to be his wife, and that this woman who sits at his breakfast-table is not the same woman as the one who dwelt in his imagination, even as the one who lived with him during the first and second year. She has lost her coyness, her little teasing ways, her girlish vivacity. She begins to surprise him by a hard common-sense, and no longer responds so easily to his old romantic moods. He can no longer be certain of her smiles and her tenderness when he speaks the old love-words. She begins to challenge his authority, not deliberately, nor openly, but by ignoring his hints, or by disregarding his advice. She even challenges his opinions, and that is a shock to him. It is a blow to his vanity. It takes down his self-conceit more than a peg or two, especially when he has to acknowledge, secretly, that she is in the right, as sometimes happens. He finds out faults in her now--a touch of selfishness, a trace of arrogance, an irritability of temper of which he has to be careful, especially when she is in a nervous state of health. They begin to quarrel rather frequently about absurd things, about things that do not matter a brass farthing. Some of these quarrels reach passionate heights and leave them both exhausted, wondering rather blankly what it was all about. Then the wife cries a little, and the husband kisses her. By the end of the fourth year they know each other pretty well. CHAPTER III In the fifth and sixth years they have settled down to the jog-trot of the married life. Not yet do they see the shadow of the Eighth Year looming ahead. They have faced the reality of life, and knowing each other as they really are have made a working compromise. Their love has steadied down to a more even flame, and passion is almost extinguished. They have decided to play the game, according to the creed of their class, exactly as their neighbors are playing it.