Maggie MacKeever by The Misses Millikin

reproaches at every opportunity. What had inspired his current snit, she could not imagine, nor did it especially signify. “I hope that I am always discreet,” she replied.
    “As do I!” said Lord Chalmers, then paused. He was not an unfair man, and there was always the possibility that he had leapt to the wrong conclusion, though what other conclusion might exist he could not say. For this lack of comprehension, there is some excuse: Lord Chalmers was by lack of time and inclination not a patron of pretty ladybirds, and consequently unaware of the expensive nature of feminine fripperies. He thought he kept his wife in very easy circumstances, and failed to understand why she was forever short of funds; he was impatient of her failure to keep to a budget, and considered it his duty to curb her spendthrift ways, an effort in which he believed he had met with some success.
    Lord Chalmers was not, however, thinking of Rosemary’s wastrel habits just then. “It seems we cannot converse easily these days. I suppose it is my fault for leaving you so much to your own devices, and I am sorry for it. I did warn you that my time is not my own—but you are very young.”
    This attempt at reconciliation, though generously offered, was not well received; to Rosemary’s ears it seemed as if her husband had for their marriage sounded a death-knell. “You refine too much on it,” she responded frigidly. “I assure you that I rub along very well without your escort. Nor,” she added resentfully, “am I a child, and for you to act as if I am annoys me excessively.”
    Obviously it did. With an oath, Lord Chalmers rose from his chair, crossed the room, grasped his wife’s wrist and pulled her to her feet. She scowled up at him, belligerently. He had meant to sternly scold her for her conduct, since it did not suit his notions of wifely behavior that Rosemary should in his presence exhibit such churlish constraint. Now, glimpsing a hint of tears behind her hostile gaze, he found that he could not. “Rosemary,” he said helplessly. “I wish that you might trust me.”
    But Rosemary was too wise to tumble for this gambit; she was not to be lulled into a candid confession that would likely land her in the divorce court. Still, her husband’s sympathetic manner was not without effect, and she had to exert tremendous power of will to keep from weeping all over his horizontally striped waistcoat. “Do not think of it!” she gasped. “I cannot! Anyway, ‘tis the most trivial of affairs!”
    Lord Chalmers was, due to his long experience of politics, also well equipped to recognize dissemblement. “You seem to be,” he observed, “sadly out of curl.”
    This remark, which Rosemary interpreted as an adverse comment upon her looks, put her further out of humor. “A passing indisposition, merely. I did not sleep well last night.”
    Had Lord Chalmers been of a different disposition, he might have expressed a willingness to help his wife achieve an excellent night’s rest, to which his wife might have responded that she would like nothing better in the world; but he did not, and neither did she, and therefore nothing was resolved. “You are,” he said, “overtaxing your strength with all these routs and soirées. I must request that you refrain from exhausting yourself.”
    Rosemary, contemplating one of the brass buttons that adorned her husband’s coat, concluded that he didn’t want her to have friends. Doubtless he would prefer to see her locked away somewhere where she could spend none of his money and behave in no way that was indiscreet—which would have suited Rosemary very well, if only her spouse was locked away with her. Reflecting that few of her acquaintances would care to claim a bosom-bow who was in residence at a debtor’s prison, Rosemary became aware that her husband awaited a response. What had they been talking about? “Lily must have her chance,” she said.
    “Lily already has half the gentlemen in