..children, even when small, would
hamper him fearfully, especially as he had not even begun to make his
million....As for herself she would be more economical than ever and help
him like the good pal she was.
Mortimer had the sensation of being trussed up with invisible but
inflexible silken thongs. His thoughts need not be recorded.
II
Alexina refurnished her bedroom in her favorite periwinkle blue; a low
graceful day-bed with a screen before the stationary washstand helped to
create the atmosphere of a boudoir. It had an intensely personal atmosphere
in which man, more particularly a lawful husband, had no place.
When Alexina stood on the threshold and surveyed this room, chaste, cool,
proud, and exquisitely lovely, she lifted her hand and blew off a kiss, out
of the window, wafting away the memory of the room as it had been. She
had remarkable powers of obliteration, a sort of River of Lethe among the
backwaters of her mind, where she held below the surface all she wished to
forget until it ceased to struggle. She never again gave a thought to
her early relationship with her husband; not even to the indifference
or distaste which had followed so quickly upon her curiosity and her
determination to feel romantic at all costs.
III
Subtly she felt she was happier than she had ever been even in those first
weeks, when she had barred the gates of her fool's paradise behind her; she
felt as free and happy as the birds skimming over the beds of periwinkle
below her window, and (miraculously finding her second youth quite as
productive as her first) took no pains to conceive of anything better.
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