"Dear Peter!" said she. And then—but unless a woman of Stella's sort is able to exercise a proper control over her countenance, she has absolutely no right to discuss her husband with his bachelor friends. It is unkind; for it causes them to feel like social outcasts and lumbering brutes and Peeping Toms. If they know the husband well, it positively awes them; for, after all, it is a bit overwhelming, this sudden glimpse of the simplicity, and the credulity, and the merciful blindness of women in certain matters. Besides, a bachelor has no business to know such things; it merely makes him envious and uncomfortable.
Accordingly, "Stella," said I, with firmness, "if you flaunt your connubial felicity in my face like that, I shall go home."
She was deaf to my righteous rebuke. "Peter is in Washington this week," she went on, looking fondly into the fire. "I had planned a party to celebrate to-day, but he was compelled to go—business, you know. He is doing so well nowadays," she said, after a little, "that I am quite insufferably proud of him. And I intend for him to be a great lawyer—oh, much the greatest in America. And I won't ever be content till then."
"H'm!" said I. "H'm" seemed fairly non-committal.
"Sometimes," Stella declared, irrelevantly, "I almost wish I had been born a man."
"I wish you had been," quoth I, in gallant wise. "There are so few really attractive men!"
Stella looked up with a smile that was half sad.
"I'm just a little butterfly-woman, aren't I?" she asked.
"You are," I assented, with conviction, "a butterfly out of a queen's garden—a marvellous pink-and-gold butterfly, such as one sees only in dreams and—er—in a London pantomime. You are a decided ornament to the garden," I continued, handsomely, "and the roses bow down in admiration as you pass, and—ah—at least, the masculine ones do."
"Yes,—we butterflies don't love one another overmuch, do we? Ah, well, it scarcely matters! We were not meant to be taken seriously, you know,—only to play in the sunlight, and lend an air to the garden and—amuse the roses, of course. After all," Stella summed it up, "our duties are very simple; first, we are expected to pass through a certain number of cotillions and a certain number of various happenings in various tête-à-têtes; then to make a suitable match,—so as to enable the agreeable detrimentals to make love to us, with perfect safety—as you were doing just now, for instance. And after that, we develop into bulbous chaperones, and may aspire eventually to a kindly quarter of a column in the papers, and, quite possibly, the honour of having as many as two dinners put off on account of our death. Yes, it is very simple. But, in heaven's name," Stella demanded, with a sudden lift of speech, "how can any woman—for, after all, a woman is presumably a reasoning animal—be satisfied with such a life! Yet that is everything—everything!—this big world offers to us shallow-minded butterfly-women!"