Do you mind?"
"It's very becoming" he said. "Anything for a novelty."
Yet he liked her surprisingly well in this phase. She had been
cutting down his liquor, too. She had been cutting down his
extravagances. She had even achieved the height of denying herself
luxuries--one of the surest and least-trodden short-cuts to a man's
heart--a little secret path he hardly knows himself.
The affair of Zada and Cheever was going the normal course. It had
lost the charm of the wild and wicked--through familiarity; and
it was tending to domestication, as all such moods do if nothing
interrupts them. There are all sorts of endings to such illicit
relations: most of them end with the mutual treachery of two fickle
creatures; some of them end with bitter grief for one or the other
or both; some of them end in crime, or at least disgrace; and some
of them finish, with disconcerting immorality, in an inexcusable
respectability.
The improvement in Zada's mind and heart was, curiously, the most
dangerous thing in the world for Cheever. If she had stayed noisy
and promiscuous and bad, he would have tired of her. But she was
growing soft and homey, gentle as ivy, and as hard to tear away or
to want to tear away. After all, marriage is only the formalizing
of an instinct that existed long before--exists in some animals and
birds who mate without formality and stay mated without compulsion.
When Zada and Cheever had escaped from the Ritz-Carlton they took
lunch at another restaurant.
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