admiration. I still did so. I should have been just as disgusted if I had heard them at the present time. But there was a happy medium to all things.
Between the conspicuously ridiculous adulation of comparative strangers, and the brotherly indifference of the man I had married, there must be a middle path of warm yet not necessarily demonstrative affection. I thought of the bride and bridegroom whom Arthur and I had criticised one night. "It disgusts me," I recollected saying, when Arthur had asked me if their conversation, to which we had listened, interested me. Well, I had no cause for such disgust in my own home. Arthur's indifference seemed to be unaffected by any policy I might adopt. I even tried to make him jealous. There was a bashful youth, who wore glasses and a perpetual smile, living close to Tavistock Villa, with an adoring mamma and two prim sisters, to whom Hector was as the apple of their eye. He had frequently cast admiringly modest glances in my direction when he had stumbled across Marie and me in our daily walks.
