No, Ethel Grandin did not think he was wonderful looking. In uniform, yes, perhaps. But she couldn’t forget the impression she had got as she walked behind Cliff through the sand, returning from the beach. By comparison to the trimness and compactness of her husband’s physique, which spoke breeding, tact, and gentleness in his every move, Cliff seemed almost a creature to beware of. His feet turned in when he walked, like an aborigine’s, and the ponderous half-­closed fists at the ends of his long arms swung monkey-­like at his sides. How a girl could have fallen in love with such a man, whose physical attraction lay only in being massive, was beyond her.

“. . . At our wedding, in his dress whites,” Billie was saying, “he was the most stunning thing you ever saw. The very same girls who warned me against him a few years ago were simply carried away. At the reception everybody decided he’d turned out all right after all. A captain in the Marine Corps is different, you know—not something to be sneezed at, I mean. To see him at the reception you’d never think he came from Haag Street.” She examined her wedding ring absently, and then added: “Of course he doesn’t have his uniform on all the time. I mean there are times—” She stopped, and looked at Ethel with childlike directness. “Is this not nice to talk about, Mrs. Grandin?”

“Why do you ask, Billie? Do you think I don’t approve?”

“I mean about his coming to bed with me. But that’s what marriage is, I guess. Isn’t it?”

“Partly.”

“At least it’s what they want.” In a smaller voice, intimate now as if thinking aloud, she went on: “He’s the best fellow I ever had—to dance with, go out with, all those things. When he comes to call for me, and when I first see him standing in the door, you can’t imagine. And out somewhere, or coming home, when he puts his arms around me and pulls me up against his chest, I just die. But later, all that goes. He seems to turn into a different person. I don’t even know whether it’s me he enjoys, or just—himself. For all he knows, I might be just anybody. He doesn’t even know I’m there.”

“Of course he does. He wants you.”

“Anybody can want—that.”

“But it’s you, Billie. He married you, didn’t he?’”

“I suppose so. But what we’ve had the last two nights we could have had anyway, without being married at all. He’d have been just the same if I’d been any other girl. Marriage doesn’t seem to have anything to do with it—Cliff doesn’t know what marriage means!”

“These things take time, Billie.”

“Not for Cliff they don’t.”