Of course Julie had every reason to take confidence in her own cool blonde beauty, but on the other hand there was the thoroughly distressing thought that perhaps she felt Marc could be trusted with these gilt-edged females simply because they could be trusted with him. No man likes to feel that his wife is sure of him not because of his own sterling qualities, but because no other woman could conceivably be so desperate as to find him attractive. Julie's bland confidence in his fidelity, Marc felt, tended to make things terribly dull in the neighborhood of the parlor, bedroom and bath. Marc looked to himself for the cause of his unhappy state of affairs. The decision was neither for nor against. Perhaps he wasn't handsome, but then he wasn't hideous either. His face actually had a rather nice angular plainness about it, and his grey eyes were undeniably kind and could, on occasion, be extremely humorous. He was a bit too thin for so tall a man, but there was a suggestion, at thirty-three, of a litheness and youth about his figure that was not unattractive. His sandy hair at least had the virtue of unobtrusiveness without any such vulgar ostentations as polished slickness or gleaming ringlets. On careful and unprejudiced analysis, Marc felt that as an example of his sex he was neither such a one as to send a woman wilting to the carpet with palpitations or screaming to the medicine chest for the salts. The clue to the rising becalmment of his marriage, then, had to lie in another quarter. But Marc was at a loss to determine its direction. What he did not realize was that, from the outset, he had allowed Julie the exclusive management of their life together without reserving for himself even the right to veto. * * * * * The truth was that Marc was shy with women to the point of reticence. Too busy and too earnest in the struggle to establish the agency in the early, salty days of his youth, he had simply missed all of the ordinary experiences, the fretful trials and errors, due the average young man bent on gaining a solid footing in life's more fundamental departments. In effect, Marc had never taken the time to brace himself against the Indian hand wrestle that sex can often become in this civilized world. He could never be a rake, either at home or abroad, simply because he hadn't had time to practice. Not that Marc didn't have the impulse for rakishness. It had merely come too late. He had always suspected that there was a more satisfactory and satisfying way of life than his, but only vaguely. There were even moments when he yearned for it desperately, without ever rightly knowing precisely what it was he yearned for.