To such a decision as this, had she heard it, Edith, too religious to acknowledge any thing tending towards fatalism, would not for a moment have agreed; yet it embodied a truth destined to cause her deepest sorrow, and which was gradually forcing itself upon her. Already, although they had been married so few weeks, even her love-blinded eyes could not but perceive much in her husband which shocked and pained her. She had not considered deeply enough, never having had the experience which would have taught her the need of considering, how great was the gulf between her moral standpoint and that of her betrothed. He had seemed so yielding that she had failed to perceive that his compliances were merely outward, and left his mental attitude unchanged. Now when it became necessary, as in every wedded life it must sooner or later, for her to appeal to his ultimate moral belief, she was startled to find nothing with which she was in sympathy. A cynic--or, indeed, her husband himself--would have assured her that it was, after all, a question of standards merely, and that difference of judgment was natural and inevitable, and that measured by his own convictions Arthur was quite well enough. Her answer to such a proposition would have been that there was but one standard, and that what differed from that were not moral principles at all, but excuses for immoral obliquity. Outwardly, it is true, there was little in her husband's life of which Edith could complain. He accompanied her to church, and if he quizzed the preacher after returning home, she was ready to excuse this as the natural result of a keen appreciation of the ludicrous. He allowed her to do as she chose in the matter of charity work, and he even refrained from going to his studio on Sunday, a sacrifice whose magnitude she had no means of estimating, and which she therefore thought would be continuous. It was when some ethical question arose between them that Edith was disquieted, feeling sometimes as if she were looking into black deeps of immorality. The principles which to her were most sacred, were to him light subjects upon which, she was well aware, only her presence prevented his jesting. The most obvious laws of rectitude were but thistle-down before the whirlwind of his subversive theories; and Edith found argument impossible with one who denied her every premise. His old acquaintances found in Arthur Fenton a change more subtle but none the less distasteful. It was a trait of his nature to assume the character he was half unconsciously acting, as a player may between the scenes still feel the personality he is simulating upon the stage; and there was about Fenton when he came in contact with the Pagans, a vague air of remonstrance and disapproval, even when he was as bold as ever in his own cynical utterances.