"She has never been given to taking sentimental views of herself," he said, "and she is self-controlled and fond of her children, but she has never been happy for an hour since her marriage. I think the first year was very bitter to her. Amory has always been very fond of her; he is fond of her now, but her illusions concerning his passion for her soon died. She found out in two months that he would not have perished if she had discarded him. She had been his one object at first, but she was only one of a dozen others after they were married. He was amiable and delightful, but he was not always considerate. The picturesqueness of his attitude toward her was lost. He did not require her care and sympathy, and the sacrifices she made for him were very simple and natural matters in his eyes. "In the beginning she was, perhaps, bewildered and desperate; but, girl as she was, she was too proud and just not to see that her youth and ignorance had led her into a folly, and that the result was its natural punishment. Once she said to me, 'The worse punishments in life are the punishments for ignorance--the worst, the worst!' And I knew what she meant, though she said no more. When her first child was born, she went down to the door of death, and her physicians said there seemed to be a lack of effort. And yet, I tell you she might have been the happiest young mother in the world. When she has been near happiness at all it has been in her quiet moments with her children. If it had not been for her children she might have been a harder and more heartless creature than she can ever be now. If she had been something less and slighter than fate made her she might have been either a dull nurse and housekeeper or a vapid woman of society; in either case she would have been happier than she is to-day. What a long story it is, and I did not think it would be so long when I began." "I want to hear it all," broke in Tredennis,--"every word. I have not understood the changes I saw in her I want to understand." "That brings me to the point of it all," was the reply. "If she had been a laborer's wife she might have been too hard-worked to be restless; but she has had leisure, and social duties, and she has set herself deliberately the desperate task of making them her pleasures. She has found an exhilaration in them which has given her no time for regrets. She is a woman, young, attractive, and spirited. She was too full of spirit to permit herself to be subdued by her disappointment. As she cannot retrieve her mistake, she will make the best of it. She has reasoned herself into a belief that she is satisfied with what fortune has given her, and so long as that belief remains unshaken, she will be as happy as nine women out of ten are. Women are not happy, as a rule, Philip; they are not happy. I have learned that." "But so long as her belief remains unshaken"--said Tredennis. The professor interrupted him, gravely, sadly.