Page:The Better Sort (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1903).djvu/31

BROKEN WINGS in the shade. He had positively believed her to have gone on all the while making the five thousand a year that the first eight or ten of her so supremely happy novels had brought her in, just as she, on her side, had read into the felicity of his first new hits, his pictures "of the year" at three or four Academies, the absurdest theory of the sort of career that, thanks to big dealers and intelligent buyers, his gains would have built up for him. It looked vulgar enough now, but it had been grave enough then. His long, detached delusion about her "prices," at any rate, appeared to have been more than matched by the strange stories occasionally floated to her—and all to make her but draw more closely in—on the subject of his own.

It was with each equally that everything had changed—everything but the stiff consciousness in either of the need to conceal changes from the other. If she had cherished for long years the soreness of her not being "good" enough, so this was what had counted most in her sustained effort to appear at least as good as he. London, meanwhile, was big; London was blind and benighted; and nothing had ever occurred to undermine for him the fiction of her prosperity. Before his eyes there, while she sat with him, she had pulled off one by one those vain coverings of her state that she confessed she had hitherto done her best—and so always with an eye on himself—deceptively to draw about it. He had felt frozen, as he listened, at such likenesses to things he knew. He recognised as she talked, and he groaned as he understood. He understood—oh, at last, whatever he had not done before! And yet he could well have smiled, out of their common abyss, at such odd identities and recurrences. Truly the arts were sisters, as was so often said; for what apparently could be more like the experience of one than the experience of another? And she spared him things with it all. He felt that too, just as, even while 19