“Well--Mary. And I was so careful about Mary,” his lips twisted, half whimsically, half painfully. “I was so damn sure. I was so damn sure I knew everything about women. “She had the qualities I'd said to myself I wanted--beauty, position, breeding, a good enough mind, some common sense. She hadn't money, but there I thought I could help her--the way she ran things for her father on what they had showed what she could do with more. We weren't in love with each other--oh dear no--but that I considered on the whole an advantage--she attracted me and it's fair enough to say that beside most of the men she'd been seeing my combination of having been Old New York and being one of the young big coming men from the West dazzled her rather. And anyhow I didn't want--passion--exactly. I thought it would take too much time when I was only in the middle of my game and getting as much real solid fun out of it as a kid gets out of cooking his own dinner in camp. I wanted a partner and a home and children and somebody to sit at the head of my table when I wanted to be--public--and yet somebody you could be at home with when you wanted to be at home. And I thought I had them all in Mary--I thought I was being about the most sensible man in the world. “Well, up till after both children were born I think I tried pretty hard. I gave her all I could think of--materially at least. And then I found out in spite of myself that you can't be married to a woman--even bearably--and neither be lovers nor friends with her. And Mary and I never got beyond the social acquaintance stage. “It wasn't all Mary's fault either--I can see that now. A good deal was in the way she'd been brought up--they weren't modern about the blisses of ignorance in the nineties. But the rest of it was Mary and she couldn't have changed it any more than she could have been rude to a servant or raised her voice more than usual when she really wanted something done. “She'd been brought up never to be demonstrative--that was one thing. But that wasn't the main trouble--the main trouble was her most curious, most frigid self-sufficiency. Until her children came she was the most wholly self-sufficient person I've ever known. She was really only happy when she was entirely alone, always. It wasn't egotism exactly--she's always had a very-well-mannered conviction of her own relative unimportance--it was just that in spite of the fact that she seemed so perfectly healthy and calm and composed whenever she was with other people they'd be sure to hurt her a little somehow or other without meaning to--the only person she could genuinely depend on never to hurt her was herself.