Mary lay awake most of the night in the strangeness of her old room. She tried to concentrate her mind piously upon her dead grandmother, but all her thoughts came back to herself. She now asked herself the question to which, when her grandmother asked it, she had returned so confident an affirmative. Would she not, if she were really happy with Jemmie, resent being away from him even for a single night? And was she not actually taking pleasure in being away from him? There was about the air of this old room of hers something delightfully fresh and invigorating. She felt much more herself. All these years of marriage she had been letting her personality be slowly submerged in her husband, in the cares of a household, and in her children. She must not forget _them_, the darlings! Should she have loved them more if their father had been somebody else? If Pierre had been their father, for instance? But then they would not be Richard, Geoffrey, and Muriel. And how could she love any other children better than those three tousle-heads? Besides, what nonsense it was to be speculating like this. She had not thought of Pierre for years, except casually to wonder sometimes where he was and if he ever thought of her. She could not deceive herself into imagining that she was still in love with Pierre, still less that she was pining for him. All the same, she wished that she had understood a little more about life before she married Jemmie. Daisy Harland, who had been so full of good worldly advice, had not made much of a success with her own marriage. Daisy, who had been so confident that love was a passing malady, had thrown over everything for love, had let herself be dragged through the divorce court for a man who when it was all over had married another woman. Poor Daisy, was she happier now, somewhere on the Continent, always wondering if her friends would put up their parasols when they passed her on some sunny promenade? And if she had not married Jemmie, she would never have had her beloved Richard. She thought of his coming back from one of his first days at school and of his news of being placed in an unusually high class for French and of his having to write out the verb _porter_. "All the verb, darling?" she had asked. "Well, that's what I couldn't ergzactly make out, Mum. Mr. Osbourne just said write out _porter_: _to carry_, and I think he only meant one of those lines of verbs like you see in the grammar book." "It wouldn't do to make a mistake, dearest," she had said anxiously. "No, it wouldn't, would it, Mummie? Perhaps I'd better write out everything, though it's pages and pages!"