This grey, starved country, so different from rich, cosy England, would have been depressing but for the swift rush of the rocking train, the warm, downy comfort of the carriage, and the fairy-like strangeness that gave everything an air of unreality. If only Charlie were there, his clear eyes wide with pleasure, sharing the fascination, enjoying the motion, asking impossible questions, and making bewildering comments! Monstrous to send such a baby to a school of rough boys. She was not spoiling him, as his father declared; he was not getting womanish ways; children need tenderness, and a boy may have charming manners and be a delightful companion without being unmanly. At Easter he would come home, steeped in savagery, inarticulate and slangy, full of the surly self-consciousness that dreads to be thought anything but brutal, or to vary by a pin's head from "other fellows." Arthur would be delighted, and say he liked boys to be boys. Arthur, whose one aim in life appeared to be to avoid showing the least sign of emotion or humanity, or anything comforting and pleasant. When it came to saying good-bye, at his sudden departure on the eve of hers, she had choked miserably and said nothing, her eyes brimming over; but he-- "Well, good-bye, dear," she seemed still to hear in a cheerful, indifferent, staccato voice, with a cold, light kiss on the face she lifted, trembling and speechless. "Hope you'll enjoy it. Plenty of hats in Paris." He was off before the last word, and had banged the door, and sprung into his cab by the time her choke was overcome. If only he had not said "dear," that commonplace symbol of conjugal indifference; "Ermengarde," with the faintest inflection of tenderness, would have made all the difference--she could even have borne the reference to hats had he said something nicer than "dear."