Page:Czechoslovak stories.pdf/155

 She interpreted it all in her own charming little head as singular that she should allow herself any critical or censuring reflections which marriage itself abolishes and excludes.

Was not everything in her matrimonial existence just as proper as her whole life and its well-ordered details had always been?

Her first kiss given and accepted after a formal engagement, her tears at the altar which were in accordance with strict etiquette, her toilettes, her education which she had received in a convent and which she had concluded with the reading of a few books of which it was perfectly proper to speak in polite society—all these had certainly been eminently proper. What more could she wish, what more could her husband demand?

Some day she would become a mother, and then of course all would be changed. She would have enough to relate to her husband then the child would laugh and cry and make its first little attempts, and later it would learn to walk, to pray, then would attend school and, in the vista of the future, she even beheld its marriage.

All these things would occur in the same succession as they had occurred to her ancestors; it had not been different with her great-grandmother, her grandmother nor even with her mother. Her mother, to be sure, had never felt any uneasiness regarding her husband and how to interest him. Her father was an honest