"My dear," he said, throwing himself into a chair, "it is at once one of the latest and the wisest of my reflections that you had better consider a newly married man as an entire stranger and form his acquaintance quite from the foundation, wholly unbiased by any notion you had of him as a bachelor."
"His wife," responded Helen quietly, "has been dining with me, so I understand something of the situation. But how did Arthur behave?"
"Like any husband who does not care to quarrel with his wife even when he disapproves of her. It is upon that principle that matrimonial felicity depends. Do you say Mrs. Fenton has been here?"
"Yes; she came to me for sympathy and I administered it by telling her that I am your wife."
"The devil! I beg your pardon; but, Helen, it was precisely because I knew she was sure to remember this Frontier scrape that I wanted her not to know. She will be very hard on you."
"Christianity is always hard," returned she; "but what difference does it make; it was only a question of time. She is sweet and pure and good, Will, but her religion holds her in bands stronger than steel. I couldn't long keep step with one in chains. It might as well come now as any time."
Her husband looked at her with evident interest not unmixed with admiration.
"She provokes me to do and to say childish things," Helen continued, "just to shock her. I told her bluntly the other day that I had been telling a falsehood, and she had the impertinence to look shocked. I am not sure that I did not go so far as to say I 'lied,' a word that hardly holds the place in English that it did in the good days of Mrs. Opie. She would have been reconciled if I had said I told what I hoped was true."
"I should have told her," laughed Dr. Ashton, "that I only used truth as the Egyptians used straw in bricks, the smallest possible quantity that will hold the rest together."
"I cannot see why Arthur married her," Helen said musingly.