Raymond had expected, of course, to give his wife her own way at the beginning—at the very beginning, that is; and he had expected, equally, to have her make a definite impression on the circle awaiting her. But—

Well, he had intended to "take her in hand," and to do it soon. She was to be formed, or re-formed; she was to be adjusted, both to things in general and to himself especially. Besides being her husband, he was to be her kindly elder brother, her monitor, patient but firm; she was to enter upon a state of tutelage. He was pretty certain to be right in all his views, opinions and practices; and she, if her views, opinions and practices were at variance with his, was pretty certain to be in the wrong. He assumed that, during those few years in Paris, she had learned it all in one big lesson only. The time had been too short to confirm all this sudden instruction into a reasoned and assimilated way of life; by no means had that superficial miscellany been rubbed into the warp and woof of her being. The Parisian top-dressing would be removed and the essential subsoil be exposed and tilled....

H'm!

One of the strongest of her early impressions was naturally that of the house in which she was to live. It was big and roomy; it was detached, and thus open to light and air. But its elephantine woodwork repelled her, for she had grown up amid the rococo exuberances of Paris apartments. The heavy honesty of black-walnut depressed her after the gilded stucco of her mother's salon. And that huge, portentous orchestrion took up such an immensity of room!

I doubt if the neighborhood itself pleased her much better, though it was homogeneous (in its way), and dignified, and enjoyed an exceptional measure of quietude. Perhaps it was too quiet, after some years of a balcony on a boulevard. And it is true that some of the big houses were vacant, and that some of the families roundabout went away too often and stayed away too long. An empty house is a dead house, and when doors and windows are boarded up you may say the dead house is laid out. Things were sometimes triste—the French for final condemnation. The exodus so long foreshadowed seemed appreciably under way. This Gertrude became increasingly conscious, as the months went on, that most of the people she wanted to see and most of the houses she was prompted to frequent were miles away, and that the flood-tide of business rolled between.

Of her reaction to the circle in which she first found herself I have given you one or two indications. It would be easy, as it would be customary, to give some other of her early social experiences in detail and her reactions to them; but my interest is frankly in her husband and in his reactions. It was of him, too, that I saw the most; and I have never gone greatly into society.

At the end of a long and possibly somewhat dull winter his wife began to hint the advantageousness of transferring themselves to that other part of town. Raymond was not precisely in the position where he cared to pay high rent for a small house, while a big house was standing empty and unrealizable. Pouts; frowns.... But nature came to his aid. With a new young life soon to appear above the horizon, now was no time to shift. His son should be born in the house in which he ought to be born. A reasonable view, on the whole; and it prevailed.

Raymond had said "son," and son it was. The baby was not named Raymond: his father, however much of an egoist, was not willing to put himself forward as such so obviously, nor for a period that promised to be indefinitely long. Nor was the baby called Bartholomew, after his maternal grandfather in the East: for who cared to inflict such an old-fashioned, four-syllable name on such a small morsel of flesh? He entered the battle under the neutral and not over-colorful pennon of Albert: his mother could thus call him "Bertie," and think, not too remotely, of her parent on the stock exchange.

Raymond was not long in discovering, after reaching home, what sacrifices the new life was to involve. On the Continent, in the midst of change and stir, these had not foretold themselves. Back in his own house, his interests—"intellectual interests" he called them—began to assert themselves in the old way. But he was no longer free to range the fields of the mind and take shots at the arts as they rose. Least of all was he to read in the evening. That was to neglect, to affront. However, the arrival of little Albert—poor tad!—changed the current of his wife's own interests and helped to place one more rather vital matter in abeyance. He was to live—for a while, anyway—in his present home; and he was to pursue—for a while, anyway—some of the accustomed interests of his bachelor days. He expected that, before long, his wife would accept his environment and the practices he had always followed within it. She needed enlightenment on many points. He had already communicated some of his views on dress, for example; and he had readjusted her notions on the preparation of salads. He gave her, pretty constantly, corrective glances through, or over, his eyeglasses,—for his sight had begun to weaken early, as his father had foreseen,—and he meant that such glances should count. She required to be edited; well, the new manuscript was worth his pains, and would be highly creditable in its revised version.