Loring had got over the first novelty of having the moon descend to his crying. Selene was now a domesticated planet. They moved in the same orbit. He felt, without realising it, somewhat as a lover might feel who, while gazing entranced at the silver disk in mid-heaven, suddenly finds himself transported among the Mountains of the Moon. The lunar landscape, thus familiarly envisaged, struck him as a little bleak. There was nothing "chummy" about Sophy, he decided. He had always thought it would be great fun to drink wine freely with the woman one was in love with. A "bully" dinner after hunting, or a cosy supper after the play, with plenty of champagne to enliven it. Champagne added such zest to kisses. He felt aggrieved that Sophy did not care for this form of bliss. She said that wine "blurred" her. Such a rum expression! He thought her prudish. He told her so on one occasion.

"Look here, Goddess," he said fretfully. "You run your temple-business in the ground. You treat love-making like a religious ceremony. Hang it!— I can't feel like Cupid's high-priest all the year 'round. Love ought to be just a bully sort of spree sometimes."

Sophy had said, flushing:

"I'm sorry I seem priggish. But I'm afraid I'll never be able to look on love as 'just a bully sort of spree.'"

Loring had flushed, too.

"Well ... a chap can't go on playing Endymion forever. I suppose there was an end even to the Moon's honeymoon!"

It was after dinner one evening during the next winter. As usual, he had been drinking freely. This always made him either amorous or irritable. As she would not endure the amorousness, irritability invariably resulted. Sophy was by this time frankly unhappy. But no one guessed it—not even Loring. She had come to feel the full weight of that family remark: "Morry has such a strong will!" She had found that this will of his was far stronger than his love for her. Yet he loved her still. At times even the old feeling of worship gave him pause for an instant. But the steady drinking—cocktails before meals, whiskey-and-soda in between meals—dulled the edge of finer sentiment. And he resented passionately the disapproval that her very silence on the subject evinced.

At first she had spoken out to him about it—with affection, honestly, as one good friend might speak to another—but when she found how useless it was, she did not "nag." And she was never "superior" in her manner towards him.

However, no one, living in the close intimacy of marriage with another, can loathe a thing as Sophy loathed this constant tippling of her husband, without the offender being aware of that unexpressed detestation.

He grew quite callous about it as time went by, but during this second winter of their marriage it made him very ugly with her at times.

And Sophy had a bitter, ironic feeling when she faced the fact of this sordid, reduced replica of the tragedy of her first marriage. That had had the dignity of real peril, at least, but this brought her only the ignominy of acute discomfort and at times humiliation.

She suffered intensely. That he could not have understood this suffering, even had she explained it, made her sometimes a little over-proud and cold. He had his full share of the discomfort. In less exacting hands, he would have made a rather easy-going if utterly selfish husband. The climate of Olympus did not at all agree with his constitution. In the legend, it is said that Endymion, after his marriage with Selene, was cast out of Olympus by the wrathful Zeus, for making love to Hera. This lapse was probably caused by the too exacting standard that Selene held up to her earthly spouse.

But they clashed also in other ways. There was a certain strain of unconventionality in Sophy, that often outraged Loring's extreme conventionality of outlook. He had found it "swagger" and amusing that she should choose to embellish an old house in Washington Square, rather than follow the social bell-wether "up to the Park." That had been a "swell" attitude in its way. But there were certain unwritten laws of "smart" propriety, which to break, he felt, was to risk being ridiculous. He would have chosen death cheerfully at any time, rather than seem ridiculous. Sophy felt otherwise. As long as she herself did not consider what she did ridiculous, she did not think at all of the opinion of "society."