"He _ought_ to be contented," Eleanor said, passionately; "I adore him!"
"You've got to interest him," her aunt said; "that's more important than adorin' him! A man can buy a certain kind of adoration, but he can't purchase interest."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Eleanor said, trembling.
"Well, if you don't, I'm sure I can't tell you," Mrs. Newbolt said, despairingly; but she made one more attempt: "My dear father used to say that the finest tribute a man could put on his wife's tombstone would be, '_She was interestin' to live with_.' So I tell you, Eleanor, if you want to hold that boy, _make him laugh_!" She was so much in earnest that for a few minutes she actually stopped talking!
Eleanor could not make Maurice laugh--she never made anybody laugh! But for a while she did "hold him"--because he was a gallant youngster, making the best of his bargain. That he had begun to know it was a bad bargain did not lessen his regret for his wife's childlessness, which he knew made her unhappy, nor his pity for her physical forlornness--which he blamed largely on himself: "She almost died that night on the mountain, to save my life!"
But he had ceased to be touched by her reiterated longing for children; he was even a little bored by it. And he was very much bored by her reproaches, her faint tempers and their following ardors of repentant love--bitternesses, and cloying sweetnesses! Yet, in spite of these things, the boarding-house marriage survived the lengthening of the fifty-four minutes of ecstasy into three years. But it might not have survived its own third winter had it not been that Maurice's unfaithfulness enforced his faithfulness. For by spring that squabble about lead pencils, which had turned his careless steps toward the bridge, had turned his life so far from Eleanor's that he had been untrue to her.
He had not meant to be untrue; nothing had been farther from his mind or purpose. But there came a bitter Sunday afternoon in March ...
Eleanor, saying he did not "understand her," cried about something--afterward Maurice was not sure just what--perhaps it was a question from one of the other boarders about the early 'eighties, and she felt herself insulted; "As if I could remember!" she told Maurice; but whatever it was, he had tried to comfort her by joking about it. Then she had reproached him for his unkindness--to most crying wives a joke is unkind. Then she had said that he was tired of her! At which he took refuge in silence--and she cried out that he acknowledged it!