Their only Way by Edgar Saltus — Read

That night, when the last guest had gone, Ketletas, approaching his wife, put an arm about her. With her hair done up with opals and her dress looped with diamonds, in the brilliant room she shone. But undulantly she backed and smiled and said -- and civilly enough: "Would you mind not mussing me?"

Ketletas strangled an oath. Still young, good natured, good looking, though not unreasonably so, a man of means and of what is amusingly termed position, before marriage he had been rather run after. So, too, had she. An heiress and a beauty, men in droves had knocked at her heart, or at least at what they thought was her heart, for while necessarily she had one, she was unware of it. Dormant and unaroused, it had never spoken. The men who knocked got for answer an uplift of her delicate chin, the level look of steady eyes and a smile not disdainful but aloof -- a smile such as that with which she had just gratified her husband, whom she had accepted, de guerre lasse, because even in these liberal days spinsterhood has its restrictions, yet mainly because, for an heiress and a beauty, marriage is the conventional thing and to be accepted as such.