Page:The cream of the jest; a comedy of evasions (IA creamofjestcomed00caberich).pdf/286

 has those epistles safely put away somewhere, you may depend on it: and for what earthly consideration would you read them aloud to her? Some day, when one or the other of you is dead, those letters will ring true again and rouse a noble sorrow; and the survivor will be all the better for reading them. But now they only prove you were once free of uplands which you do not visit nowadays: and that common knowledge is a secret every wife must share half-guiltily with her husband—even in your happiest matrimonial ventures—as certainly as it is the one topic they may not ever discuss with profit.

For you are married, you and she: and you live, contentedly enough, in a four-square world, where there is the rent and your social obligations and the children's underclothing to be considered, long and long before indulgence in rattle-pate mountain-climbing. And people glibly think of you as Mr. and Mrs. Grundy now, almost as a unit: but do you really know very much about that woman whose gentle breathing—for we will not crudely call it snoring—you can always hear at will o' nights?