That was another thing--her neatness was something inhuman, something almost appalling. She always put everything back in its place, always folded up the papers and laid them down tidily on the table when she had finished them, always devoted the hour after breakfast and after tea to the writing of letters, was always dressed and ready exactly a minute before the gong sounded. Neat, neat, heartlessly neat, were all her proceedings, from the way she docketed her ideas to the way she buttoned her boots and did her hair. True it was, indeed, that the maid was responsible for these details, but she, too, had evidently been mastered by Gundred’s devastating tidiness. Never a thought mislaid, never a curl misplaced, never too much or too little of anything, no excess, no enthusiasm, no hot outbursts, nothing but a serenely equable development, as cruel and crushing in its steady, remorseless movements as the advance of a steam-roller. If she sat, she sat with perfect correctness: feet in the proper position, hands folded in her lap, or prettily occupied with some pretty piece of work. If she walked, it was crisply, concisely, without softness or undulations, erect, well-modulated, and poised in the certainty of faultlessness. And the very qualities that had so appealed to Kingston’s fastidiousness a month before, now became a terror when he contemplated a lifetime’s endurance of them. To see Gundred ruffled, muddy, untidy, would have been as great a joy to him as water in the wilderness; but no wind ever tumbled the orderly daintiness of her hair, no gale ever pushed her hat out of place, no mud ever dared adhere to her brilliant little boots. Never tired, never angry, never out of looks, Gundred was also never buoyant, never ecstatic, never radiant, and the bland sweet monotony of her threatened to become as maddening to her husband as the incessant repetition of one level, unvarying note. One or two small habits she had, too, which exasperated him at times. She was fond, for one thing among others, of talking about God in a frequent, casual way that he found intolerable in its assumption of intimacy, and in its cheapening of the soul’s most private thoughts. God’s, to Gundred, was the biggest name on her visiting-list, and she displayed it with a pride that people quite devoid of terrestrial vulgarity sometimes think it allowable to display when talking of their acquaintance in celestial circles. Her soul had a tinge of supramundane snobbishness, and though, on earth, she would not have thanked a Queen for a kiss, she took a gentle satisfaction in emphasizing her possession of the Almighty’s approving friendship. She conceived heaven as an enormously magnified and everlasting Court-concert, where only the “nicest” people were admitted, and where she herself was not only to have the entrée, but to be in the very heart of the royal set.