"Then, why are there so many unhappy marriages?" asked the latter.
"Ah, in books, only. They are there because the author does not know what else to say. 'You can't write about happy marriages,' so an author assured me. 'They are so dull. Happy people have no history.'"
Maud was silent a moment.
"You have changed very much, Kitty," she said at length.
"Thank goodness, I have! Oh, Maud, I don't mean to be nasty to you. Those old days were really dear days. But one can't always remain a girl, Maud. It is mercifully ordained that girls become women. And the door by which they enter is marriage."
"It means all that?"
"All. More——"
Maud found herself struggling for utterance. The blush and the downcast eye which she had thought Anthony could never have produced in her were hers now.
"You mean a man—the fact of a man?" she said stammeringly.
Kitty laughed the laugh of a newly-married woman, which is as old as Eve.