Assisted by Nanny and Mazie, she unpacked the trunks into drawers and closets. When the last box was empty, Jimmie took them down to the cellar. She was established—was at home. She and Dick were to have the same bedroom; he would use the big spare bedroom directly across the hall and its bath for dressing. It was all most convenient, most comfortable. But she could not get interested, could not banish the feeling that she would soon be flitting, that she was stranger, intruder here. And the last sweet days of the honeymoon kept recurring in pictured glimpses of their happiness of various kinds, all centering about love. How tender he had been, how absorbed in their romance—that wonderful romance which began ideally in a chance meeting and love at first sight. And now, just as she was getting over her deep-down shyness with him, was feeling the beginnings of the courage to be wholly her natural self, to show him her inmost thoughts, o release the tenderness, the demonstrativeness that had been pent up in her all her life—just as the climax of happiness was at hand—here was this shadow, this relegating her to the chill isolation and self-suppression and self-concealment of a pedestaled Vaughan wife. "He acts as if a woman were not like a man—as if I had no sense because I’m not tall, and don’t go about in a frown and spectacles." And it depressed her still further to recall that his attitude had been the same throughout courtship and honeymoon—treating her as a baby, a pet, something to protect and shield, something of which nothing but lover’s small talk was expected. She had liked it then; it seemed to fit in with the holiday spirit. "I gave him a false impression. It’s my fault." To pretend to be infantile for purposes of a holiday of love-making is one thing; to have one’s pretense taken as an actual and permanent reality—that was vastly different, and wearisome, and humiliating, and not to be permitted. "But," she reflected, "it’s altogether my fault. And the thing for me to do is not to talk about it to him, but just quietly to go to work and make myself his wife—fit myself for it." A wonderful man she thought him; and it thrilled her, this high and loving ambition to be worthy of him, and not mere pendant and parasite as so many wives were content to be.