“Billy!” The young husband was plainly aghast.
“Well, I am—because I like the making-up,” dimpled Billy, with a mischievous twinkle as she broke from his clasp and skipped ahead up the stairway.
CHAPTER VIII. BILLY CULTIVATES A “COMFORTABLE INDIFFERENCE”
The next morning, under the uncompromising challenge of a bright sun, Billy began to be uneasily suspicious that she had been just a bit unreasonable and exacting the night before. To make matters worse she chanced to run across a newspaper criticism of a new book bearing the ominous title: “When the Honeymoon Wanes A Talk to Young Wives.”
Such a title, of course, attracted her supersensitive attention at once; and, with a curiously faint feeling, she picked up the paper and began to read.
As the most of the criticism was taken up with quotations from the book, it was such sentences as these that met her startled eyes:
“Perhaps the first test comes when the young wife awakes to the realization that while her husband loves her very much, he can still make plans with his old friends which do not include herself.... Then is when the foolish wife lets her husband see how hurt she is that he can want to be with any one but herself.... Then is when the husband—used all his life to independence, perhaps—begins to chafe under these new bonds that hold him so fast.... No man likes to be held up at the end of a threatened scene and made to give an account of himself.... Before a woman has learned to cultivate a comfortable indifference to her husband's comings and goings, she is apt to be tyrannical and exacting.”
“'Comfortable indifference,' indeed!” stormed Billy to herself. “As if I ever could be comfortably indifferent to anything Bertram did!”
She dropped the paper; but there were still other quotations from the book there, she knew; and in a moment she was back at the table reading them.