you covet power? Then in some new and far-off region a gigantic empire shall be founded that will hail you queen. Riches? Such profusion shall be poured into your lap that the name of Crœsus shall wither off the records of the world like a poor and trivial thing. Fame? Then in poem and romance of unrivalled brilliance the name of Christabel shall be enshrined to receive the homage of a thousand generations long after the glories of Petrarch's Laura and Dante's Beatrice have faded from the memory of the age. Ask what you will that I may set the seal of an inviolable promise to your wish.'
"She did not chide him for his reckless flights. She looked thoughtfully out across the splendour of the restless water, seeing dimly, he thought, some faint mirage of those purple visions.
"'Well,' she admitted at length, 'there is one thing certainly that I have always set my mind upon. Promise me, dear, that when we do get a house we shall have venetian blinds—to the front windows, at all events.'
"This palpably inopportune request suddenly revealed to my father, as by a providential flashlight, the utter incongruity of their minds. What prospect of true happiness could he reasonably anticipate when every detail of their lives was antagonistic—his romances bound to her venetian blind cords, his empires brought into line with the restricted vision from her front windows? The newspapers of that period were devoting pages to the views of countless well-meaning people who had discovered marriage to be a failure, who had come to the conclusion that their partners were thriftless on the one side and piggish on the other, who had courageously argued to the conviction that they did not know what they believed in, but fancied that it was in nothing; the newspapers of that period were also devoting columns to reports of conscientious husbands and wives who mur-
