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 brate. "Sometimes, at least once in the course of a woman's married life," he said, "I imagine there is some service, perhaps trifling, perhaps important, that only a man other than her husband can render. If such an occasion ever arises for you, I shall be there, eager to perform it. I think I can be impersonal and friendly at the same time. It's my only real talent. Moreover, I'm older than Keble, in imagination if not in years, and am more acutely conscious of certain shades of things that concern him than he can be."

The unspoken corollary was that Walter was also more acutely conscious than Keble of certain shades of herself, and in that moment a ray of light penetrated to an obscure recess of Louise's mind, a recess that had refused to admit certain unlovely truths and heterodoxies,—a recess that had declined, for instance, to put credence in the change of heart of so many women in books and plays: Nora Helmer, Mélisande, Guinevere; and for the first time in her life she understood how there could be a psychology of infidelity. For the first time she understood that one might have to be unfaithful in the letter to remain faithful in the spirit. Just as one might have to break a twenty-dollar bill to obtain a twenty dollars' worth. It was a strangely sweet, strangely unhappy moment, but only a moment, for almost immediately she was recalled to a consciousness of hand-bags, cloaks, veils, and small, nameless duties of eyes and hands and lips. Then Mrs. Windrom kissed her