She became thoughtful, almost reserved, she began to show a certain respect for convention--not for the social conventions at which she had always laughed, and still laughed, but for the fundamental laws of truth, simplicity, and cleanness, upon which the ideal of civilization, at least, is based. She noticed that she was beginning to like "good" persons, even homely, dowdy, good persons, like Alice and George Valentine. She lost her old appetite for scandal, for ugly stories, for reckless speech. Warren, freed once and for all from his old prejudice, found nothing troublesome now in the thought that she had been another man's wife; it was a common situation, it was generally approved. As in other things, he had had stupidly conventional ideas about it once--that was all. But Rachael winced at the sound of the word "divorce," not because of her own divorce, but at the thought that some other man and woman had promised in their first love what later they could not fulfil, and hated each other now where they had loved each other once, at the thought that perhaps--perhaps one of them loved the other still! "Divorce is--monstrous," she said soberly to her husband in one of their hours of perfect confidence. "How can we say it, of all persons, my darling? Don't be hidebound!" "No," she smiled reluctantly, "I suppose we can't. But--but I never feel like a divorced woman, Warren, I feel like a different woman, but not as if that term fitted me. It sounds so--coarse. Don't you think it does?" "No, I never thought of it quite that way. Everyone makes mistakes," he answered cheerfully. "Don't you care--that it's true of me?" she asked. "Are you trying to make me jealous, you gypsy!" he laughed. But there was no answering laughter in her face. "Yes, perhaps I am," she admitted, as if she were a little surprised that it was so. And in her next slowly worded sentence she discovered for herself another truth. "I mind it, Warren!" she said. "I wish, with all my heart, that it wasn't so!" "That isn't very consistent, sweet. Your life made you what you were, the one woman in the world I could ever have loved. Why quarrel with the process?" "I wish you cared!" she said wistfully. "Cared?" "Yes--suffered over it--objected. Then I could keep proving to you that I never in my life loved anyone, man, woman, or child, until now!" "But I believe that, my darling!" She smiled at his wide, innocent look, a mother's amused yet hopeless smile, and as they rose from their late luncheon he put his arm about her and tipped her beautiful face up toward his own. "Don't you realize, my darling, that just as you are, you are perfect to me--not nearly perfect, or ninety-nine per cent. perfect, but pressed down and running over, a thousand per cent., a million per cent.?" he asked. Her dark beauty glowed; she was more lovely than ever in her exquisite content. "Oh, Warren, if you'd only say that to me over and over!" she begged.