"Too much! More than I can manage. Estelle, is nothing of value unless it costs money? Must one always lunch and dine and sup with people whose daily income equals our half-yearly one? Can a woman ever look well in a frock which costs less than twenty pounds? Oh, one must go to so-and-so--everyone does. Is there nothing simple left in life?" said Bertie, drearily. "No pleasure in a corner of the country where a man could pay his way honestly, and eat strawberries in June and peaches in August?" "Is it as bad as that?" Estelle came to the table, glanced at some of the books. She was a slight girl, with nothing but her grey eyes redeeming her from mediocrity. Bertie Carteret sat opposite a full-length portrait of his wife. It was tinted, showing her dazzling colouring, her rounded figure. It stared at him with Esmé's careless, joyous smile. Never yet, when he had touched her, had the softness of her ivory neck, the warmth of her white skin, failed to wake passion in him, make him wax to the heat of love, melting and desiring. So she had won his heart when he met her in the country, the beauty of a small military station, a doctor's daughter, well born, but dowerless, bringing beauty alone as her marriage portion. Her beauty, her joyous love of life, had won her a niche in London Society. Friends had given her introductions, and Esmé had grown into the life as a graft grows to the parent stem. What poet has written that each woman is a flower with its characteristics, its scent, or beauty? Was not this wife of his a gorgeous sunflower, turning her head to the light and warmth of amusement, standing out among her fellows, dazzling as she caught the light, a thing to look at and admire, but not to bend one's face over drinking in a rare sweet perfume. Now that he sat thinking he knew there had been none of the intimacy of married lovers; no scheming for their dual interests, no planning of some little trip to be taken together, none of the talks which wed man and woman more surely than the service ordained by law. Nothing but love and laughter. Together, with the world shut out, Bertie must not talk of ordinary things, but of Esmé. She would lean against him, exquisite, perfect, silken draperies merely veiling her long, rounded limbs, and he must talk of her alone. Tell her again and again how beautiful she was; find new perfection in her golden hair, her bright cheeks, the curves of her beauty. Then in the mornings, when there was an hour before they need get up, when Esmé had put on a lace cap and got into some soft-hued wrapper, she would chatter gaily, but never of their future, of the home which Bertie, man-like, dreamt of; but of the day's doings, of luncheon and tea and dinner and theatre, of flying from place to place, from friend to friend.