She knew what he wanted

■ Mme. Tressant hung up the telephone and returned to the small living room. Her husband, peacefully smoking his cigar before an open window that looked out on the trees of La Muette, looked up anxiously.

"Madeleine, my dear, what's the matter?" he asked.

"That was Simone on the telephone. She's terribly distressed about something."

"What do you mean? What has happened?"

"I don't know. She's coming here directly. She said: 'Mother, I want to see you at once, and Father,, too. No, no one is ill, but I must see you. Wait for me—I'll be over at the house in a quarter of an hour.'

"Poor darling—she still says 'at the house' as she did when she lived here, with us. What do you suppose can have happened? We were together all afternoon the day before yesterday. She seemed cheerful then. She spent yesterday with the Dulantiers at Marly—her husband was with her. To-day we were to meet for tea at five o'clock. . . . And now this mysterious telephone call! "

"Let us be calm," said M. Tressant, doubtfully. "She'll be here in ten minutes and we'll know what's going on."

An apprehensive silence fell between them as they sat thinking of their only daughter. The last rays of the afternoon sun through the open window lighted their bowed heads with a kind of melancholy splendour.

Though they were both of middle age, they were well preserved, solidly and soberly prosperous; they still seemed young. They had, too, that completely married look which depends, not upon the features, but upon the manners, the gestures, the choice of words, that twenty-five or thirty years of living together tend so often to make similar. Now the same anxiety made their faces look drawn— faces, that, as a rule, reflected only a perfect satisfaction with life.

FREDERIC BOUTET

An excursion into the philosophy of marriage reveals to a husband a secret thirty years old

"It's hard," said Mme. Tressant, presently, with a sigh, "to have an only daughter and to realize that her happiness no longer depends upon one's self! Do you suppose her husband—?"

Her voice broke a little on the last word. Although Mme. Tressant had selected her sonin-law with tremendous care, and had not accepted him without being sure that he was less unworthy of Simone than her other suitors, she could never think of the man who had taken her child from her three years ago without a secret jealousy, which she was very careful to conceal.

"My dear Madeleine, you're absurd!" M. Tressant exclaimed. "Raymond is a splendid chap, thank heaven, and Simone is very happy with him. Only—what can you expect? She's only a child, and we spoiled her."

"Spoiled her? I know my own child! But— here she is! Simone, darling, what is the matter? I've been so worried ever since you telephoned!"

■ Simone, who had just come into the small room, did not answer at once. She embraced her mother, then her father, and swept the hat from her blonde hair with a rough, despairing gesture. She resembled her mother as much as a very slim young woman, supple and fresh, and as blonde as amber, can be expected to resemble a corpulent and majestic lady, elaborately made-up and with her hair discreetly lightened. Simone sank into a chair and said abruptly, in a dry voice;

"I had to see you both, I need your advice. It's about my husband .....

"So!" exclaimed M. Tressant suspiciously.

Mme. Tressant said nothing, but a small light of indignation dawned in her eyes.

■ "Yes," Simone went on. "We quarrel. We quarrel more and more all the time! I haven't told you because I didn't want to worry you, and—well—because it humiliated me, too. It all began last year. At first we had little trifling spats about nothing at all—a chair he wanted put in one place and I in another. I wouldn't give in! And then, if I was late for dinner, he scolded me. Sometimes he'd be delayed for hours, on account of business—hadn't I the right to be a little late too, once in a while? I told him so, and that annoyed him. And then he complained about my dresses—he found them too low in the neck, too thin. He said I had a delicate throat and he was afraid I would catch cold. But that wasn't it—he was jealous. And it's ridiculous! I have a right to dress as I please—if I haven't, it's hardly worth while being married at all!

"Then, when we go out! He likes quiet restaurants where one does get awfully good food, and afterwards to go to a music hall or a revue. As for me, I prefer gay restaurants where they have music and modern plays at the theatre. So I sulk and he gets cross, and we quarrel about that!" She brooded for a moment, running long, nervous fingers through her amber hair. "And, above all, he can't realize that I had a great many friends before we were married and that there isn't any reason at all why I should suddenly become formal with them now. Yesterday, in the country, at the Dulantiers, we played tennis and danced. Jacques Nangis was there. He's veryamusing, very sympathetic, and as you know, I knew him long before I so much as guessed that there was any such person as Raymond. And he was so glad to see me again—I mean Jacques, of course.

"Well, on the way home, Raymond made a scene. It lasted till midnight. I've never seen him in such a state. He accused me of having flirted outrageously—he wept! Naturally I couldn't endure it. I was furious, and I packed him off this morning. We're not speaking. So —so—oh, can't you see—?"

■ She rose and began walking back and forth nervously, tensely, her voice unsteady with tears.

"Ah! So that's what goes on!" growled M. Tressant. "Well, I shall have something to say to this fellow who makes you cry!"

But Mme. Tressant silenced him with a gesture. Her own heart ached for her daughter's distress, but she went to her quietly, and gently took her hands.

"Only one thing matters to me, dearest— your happiness," she said. "I admit that I hated to have you marry, because it took you away from me. But I love you unselfishly. I should have felt that I was not only absurd but, somehow, guilty if I had interfered with your married life by trying to maintain an authority over you that I no longer possessed. I should be just as much to blame now if I didn't try to make you see things as they really are. You are married to a splendid boy, who has many good qualities, who is very much in love with you, and with whom, you ought to be able to live happily and peacefully. To succeed in doing that, darling, you need onlygood will—and a little tact. Oh, I know— you're a spoiled child! With us you didn't need tact. It was enough for you to say 'I want—' for you to get anything you wished. It isn't quite like that now. Your husband likes to have his way too—remember that. Why be obstinate? Why vex yourself just to annoy him? Why be stubborn about always being in the right?"

■ "But when I really am in the right!" protested Simone, plaintively.

"Yes, yes, you think you're right, and your husband thinks he is, and what difference does it really make to you which of you is right? The old proverb is still true, you see: gently does it. Give in about some little thing, with an air of making a great sacrifice, and he won't dare not to give you your way about the big things. Suppose you are late. Tell him, before he can scold you, how distressed you were on the way home because you knew how worried he would be. If he thinks your dress is cut too low, fasten it with a brooch that will really only seem to close it enough to satisfy him; and agree with him that extreme fashions of any kind are unattractive.

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(Continued from page 61)

"If you have danced too often with Jacques Nangis, a childhood friend, you must seem to be astonished at your husband's first word of reproach. Laugh and tell him the truth. 'Jacques? Why, he doesn't c'ount—he's a boy I've known all my life. Darling, you can't be jealous of him—we used to dance together when we were both ten years old!' And—next time, be careful to dance more with other men.

"You say whatever comes into your mind. You assert your rights, your opinions. What's the use? A wife has to be clever about these things. Men think of themselves as strong and of us as weak. We must make use of that very weakness. That flatters their vanity— the vanity that, when we wound it, makes the best of them intractable. You understand, don't you, Simone? To seem to obey, and in reality to command obedience, is the secret of married bliss for the average woman, my dear—believe me!"

Mme. Tressant glanced at her husband, and fell abruptly silent. He was staring at her in astonishment, his cigar drooping in his hand. He was staring at her as though she were a stranger, a woman whom he had never seen before.

She shrugged, but caught her lip nervously between her teeth. She had completely forgotten that he was there. Distressed by her daughter's tears, in her eagerness to comfort her, to reason with her, she had spoken impetuously without reflecting that every word she uttered was a revelation for M. Tressant—that he, too, in his time, had struggled against gowns too revealing of the charms they were supposed to conceal, against tastes that differed from his, against counterparts of the too attentive Jacques Nangis. In one moment she had made clear to him the whole secret of their fhirty years of harmony together, had revealed to him the true worth of that masculine authority which he so jealously cherished. He must be wondering miserably, now, just how far she had perfected this delicate art of blinding him to the truth!

"Oh, well!" she thought. "If he learns the truth now it no longer makes much difference!"

But when Simone, enlightened and comforted, had gone and they were alone, she said:

"I had to advise that poor child to use some tact. You can easily see that with Raymond, who isn't very bright—"

"Please—don't bother to explain," requested her husband fretfully. His pride was still hurt, and he was trying to conceal it under a cloak of elaborate dignity.

She looked at him thoughtfully, smiling, and in her eyes there was an expression which had come effortlessly to dwell thex-e through thirty years of unconscious practice. It was a blending of patience, of sympathy, of love and a kind of subtle admiration; it lingered upon him protectively, yet exalted him a little too—clothed him anew with the dignity of being a man, and her husband.

"Darling," she said softly, "you've always made me so happy!"