She had been a good wife to him according to the Scriptures, but he needed another kind of wife, one who could fill a public position, a wife according to the world. She grasped this fact clearly, held it before her, regarded it with remarkable intelligence during a strictly private interview she had with herself on this subject some time the next day. She wondered how many wives combined the two offices which George required of her. If you were the social official of his home, if you “played the game,” as he called it, how could you be--well, the kind of wife she had been to George? She thought of Shippen in connection with this reflection. She could not have told why, but she did. She was not so stupid as not to suspect that Shippen had something to do with this sudden desire that George had to live in New York. “Playing the game” meant coming in constant contact with men like Shippen, women like the women they had discussed that night at dinner--Shippen and soubrettes; somebody’s wife they had seen in a café with a man who was not her husband and whom they had discussed with a curious sort of grinning admiration, as if this lady was a lady to be reckoned with. Helen was wrong, of course, in the picture she drew of the game the worldly wife must play. But there was this much sanity in her point of view: Such a wife cannot always choose her partner nor the card she must play. It is a skin game, matrimonially speaking, and sometimes the one skinned is the husband, more frequently it is the wife, even if it is only the gossips who do the skinning. Helen made her way through such reflections as these, not as I have written them down in words, but as one walking through the dark in a dangerous place, with cautious steps and outstretched hands, feeling the edges of strange abysses with her feet, touching unknown things that might be alive with reptilian life. The private mental life of all women, good or bad, is usually morbid, consisting of thoughts or speculations which bring an emotional crisis and leave them in fears and tears more frequently than we can believe, judging by the faces they show. Helen passed at this time through some such crisis. She was not changed by it, because women of that sort are the “amens” of their sex. But she was confirmed. She remembered what George had said long ago about this belief in the freedom of love. She had often recalled it, always with a pang of terror. If she had ever been jealous of him, it was in this indefinite way. Now the way that led to such love seemed to widen before her eyes.