When Strange set out on his honeymoon, it was with a distinct project simmering in his brain. He meditated a good three months’ loiter through the byways of the Tyrol, on into Switzerland, and then home through the towns of the Netherlands, and all by routes best known to himself.

It becomes, however, a moral impossibility for a man to loiter with any comfort by the side of a new-made wife, into whose very bones and marrow the spirit of unrest has crept, and so, by intangible gradations the loiter had developed into a tumultuous forging on.

Gwen seemed possessed by a very dignified and quite calm-seeming devil; he was a gentlemanly creature and made no untoward fuss or excitement, but movement he must have, he dared not rest.

In spite of herself, Gwen found growing in her from the very day of her marriage, a craving, full of subdued fierceness, to be in the very middle of the hurly-burly, no matter whether it raged in a fashionable hotel, or, in the market-place of a country town. She had, besides, other uncomfortable ways. In valleys, where the sun shone and the wind rested, and where ordinary mortals were bathed in a soft entrancement of delight, she seemed to lose half her life.

On the contrary, she lived, her voice regained its timbre, her eyes shone, her mouth laughed, her very hair sparkled with vitality, as soon as ever she got high on a mountain—the bleaker and harsher the better.

One day they had climbed to the top of the D’Auburg, a dour-looking mountain in the Tyrol generally avoided of tourists, but for some reason Gwen took it into her head to ascend it.

She now sat glowing and tingling with radiant health, leaning up against a rock that sheltered her from the blast that was screeching across the ledge of the mountain. She looked as cool, and as beautiful and unruffled, as if she had just dropped from the clouds, instead of climbing up to them by a most villainous path. There was always a sort of exotic splendour about her, and yet she never seemed out of place.

“Are you never tired?” said her husband, as he was pouring some wine into a little silver cup.

“Never! I don’t remember ever once having been tired.”

“Looked at from the carnal mind of a chaperon, that was rather a nuisance, wasn’t it?”

“It was; Lady Mary suffered a good deal from it. I used to try to accommodate myself to her in this matter and to look tired, but I never could manage it.”

“Have another sandwich?”

She went on in a reflective way as she ate it,

“It is a wretched thing generally, for a woman to be absolutely untireable. A very strong woman is docked of half the privileges of her sex. If you notice the stock devoted husband, he has always a sickly creature of a wife to devote himself to—or one that poses as sickly—or if her body isn’t sickly, her brain is. You hardly ever find a woman quite sound in wind and limb and intellect, with an absolutely unselfish husband, ready to think all things for her, and to dance attendance on her to all eternity. Helplessness is such supreme flattery. I tell you, the modern man doesn’t like intellect any more than his fathers before him did, if it comes home too much to him.”

“No! Sickliness and softness of brain don’t, however, appeal equally to all men.”

“I suppose not; but the things they carry in their train do. The parasitical, gracious, leaning ways, the touch of pathos and pleading,—those are the things I should look for if I were a man, they charm me infinitely. Then that lovely craving for sympathy, and that delicious feeling of insecurity they float in, which makes the touch of strong hands a Heaven-sent boon to them—those women, you see, strew incense in your path and they get it back in service. When one hears of a devoted couple and is called on to admire with bated breath, I never can till I have dug out the reason of this devotion. I hate sticking up people on pinnacles, and then having to knock them down like a pair of nine-pins.”

“Hero worship isn’t your tap evidently, but if one makes a principle of never smelling a flower or eating fruit until one has ascertained the manure used in its growth, one gets put off a lot. By the way, I haven’t noticed any marked symptoms of mental or physical decay in you, and yet, God knows and can possibly score up the number of your lovers—they certainly were beyond all human computation.”

She flashed a quick untranslatable look at him and smiled.

“My lovers? They weren’t lovers at all, they were explorers, experimental philosophers. They had the same strong yearning for me that a botanist has for a blue chrysanthemum or a yellow aster. If a man could succeed in getting this thing he would go mad over it and put it in the best house in his grounds for all his neighbours and friends to admire, but do you think he would love it like an ordinary sweet red rose that he can gather, and smell, and caress, and bury his nose in, and wear near his heart? Not he!

“Do you think one of these men ever wanted to touch me,” she went on calmly, taking little sips of wine, “or to ruffle the hair round my forehead which is their invariable habit in novels, or to lay his hand on my bare shoulder—they do that, too, I have read—or to clasp me to his breast, the climax to these pretty little customs of theirs? Goodness! And imagine my feelings if one had! But they didn’t even want to; and yet they were my slaves, to do with precisely as I liked.

“When I was in the thick of it I thought I could not live without all this, yet it was disappointing on the whole, I believe. I remember wishing now and then that I could flirt like other girls, and make men make palpable fools of themselves for my sake. It looks such a very delightful pastime! I have seen plain girls look positively quite beautiful when engaged in it. The under-current of heaps of girls lives, upon which it seems to me all the rest is built up, is a sort of simmering, unconfessed, vague longing for the sensation of being ‘caught and kissed’, like the little brown maid in the old rhyme; not in a general vulgar way, but in a well-bred particular way. It is a quite incomprehensible sensation to me.”

“Probably. It’s natural all the same,” he said looking at her eyes which regarded him curiously, “and Nature is such a vindictive grasping beast it is as well not to run counter to her, or she will have limb for limb.”

“I wonder what limb of mine she will want?”

“Oh you, she’ll trip you up in your own coils somehow! Fill you with an overpowering desire to be ‘caught and kissed’,” he said with a short laugh, “and have no one handy to do it.”

“Oh, then she must make me over again!”

She stood up and looked down over the gloomy valley.

“What is it to be natural, I wonder? I don’t know.”

“Time will tell you all about it. Now, you want to be down over that precipice? Well, anyway, I am glad you are warranted sound. Come on, my yellow aster!”

They were past the precipice, far down the other side when Gwen spoke again.

“Humphrey,” she said, with a stronger trace of emotion in her voice than he had ever detected there before, “upon my word, I often wish for your sake I was just a good common frowsy red cabbage-rose.”

“Ah, do you?—Well, ‘die Zeit bringt Rosen!’”