"Yes. By Jove. That's it. There are too many women in the world."
As America to Columbus was this discovery to him. He stepped upon the firm but inhospitable land of thought, and was instantly afraid. His brain twinged in protest, but the adventure was begun, and he saw himself in a flash of vision as isolated in the wilderness with Stella and Mrs. Marwood, Stella young and radiant, Mrs. Marwood faded and worn, and it seemed to him that life had stopped still, indeed had always been still and that he had been wrong to think of it as moving too fast for him. He had been right to sit still and everybody else had been wrong to try and overtake life. It never moved. It just took shape and slowly emerged, and the only thing to do was to watch life—just that. How could one do thing else? After all, there was he, there was Stella, and there was Mrs. Marwood, Stella like a wood in primrose-time and Mrs. Marwood like the same wood when the leaves have fallen.
"By Jove," said Digby, gasping with excitement. "By Jove, I'm a philosopher, and . . . damn it all, I'm a . . . I'm a poet."
That exaltation did not last long, and he admitted frankly that he was after all only a man on the point of being married.
Married he was. Stella was a perfectly adorable bride, and she revelled in her honeymoon. Not again was Digby troubled with thought. He smoked, read, talked, boasted, laughed, kissed, wept, and was the normal husband. Stella teased, cajoled, explored his temper, his tastes, his humour, his appetites, and put on womanhood as gracefully as she did her clothes.
When they returned to the world, they had a small house in town, a larger house in the country, a motor car—and Mrs. Marwood, whom, curiously enough, they never discussed, though nothing was done without her being consulted. Digby remembered occasionally that this, in the small matters of every-day existence, had been his habit, but it irritated him to see Stella emulating him. Yet he could say nothing. Stella was happy. That was the chief, the only consideration. Sometimes she lost her temper with him for his reiteration of the question:
"Are you happy?"
Once indeed she lost her temper so violently that when she asked him why he couldn't assume that she was happy he replied with the touching frankness which sometimes overcame him:
