All through Sunday she took counsel with herself, going to communion at the restful little Marillo church, and putting new intensity into her devotion. She had guests at lunch and went out to dinner, and, though equal to all the social demands, her mind did not relinquish the purpose she had in view. Could she have accomplished it without her husband’s aid, she would probably not have taken him into her confidence. It being her special task to deal with the children, the less he knew of their mistakes and escapades the simpler it was for them all. It may be an illuminating digression here to say that there had been a time, some fifteen years earlier, when Junia had had an experience as difficult as the one she was facing now. Nothing but a trained subconsciousness had carried her through that, and she looked for the same mainstay of the self to come to her aid again. One of the lessons she had learned at that time was the value of quietude, of reserve in "giving herself away." She was not one to whom this restraint came natural; but for the very reason that it was acquired, it had the intenser force. It was at a time when they had lived in the Marillo house only a little while, and the Bradley of that day was not the portly, domesticated bigwig of the present. He was a tempestuous sea of passions right at the dangerous flood-tide, the middle forties. The first ardor of married life was at an end for both of them; but while, for her, existence was running more and more into one quiet purposeful stream, for him it was raging off in new directions. Whatever Junia suspected she was too wise to know it as a certainty. Knowing, she argued, would probably weaken her and do nothing to strengthen him. Already she was more intensely a mother than she was a wife, living in the amazing careers she was planning for her children. Edith would marry an English peer, while Bob would take a brilliant place in his own country. Their victories would be her victories, till, in some far-distant, beatified old age, she would be translated to the stars. And then one afternoon, when the flagged pavement had only recently been laid and they were drinking tea on it, Bradley had said, right out of a clear sky: "Junia I don’t know whether you’ve suspected it or not, but for some time past I’ve had a mistress." That was the instant when she first learned the value of a schooled subconsciousness. It seemed to her that she had been slain; and yet, with a nerve little less than miraculous, she went on with her tasks among the tea things. "If you’ve done it so far without telling me, Bradley," she said, at last, with only the slightest tremor in her tone, "why shouldn’t you let me remain ignorant?" "Does that mean that you don’t care if I go on?" "I think you can answer that as well as I. What I don’t care for is to be drawn into an affair from which your own good taste—merely to put it on that ground—should be anxious to leave me out." He looked at her savagely.