Page:The Pacific Monthly volumes 1-3.djvu/147



WO people, a man and a woman, were sitting in a well-furnished room on the ground floor of a house where apartments were to be let. There was the glare of the warm May sun on the road outside, and the noise of passing carriages containing daintily dressed women, with fair, expressionless faces, as befitted those bent on a weary round of afternoon calls.

The man sat close to the window with a cigar between his teeth. The girl had chosen an armchair near the door, which communicated with the bedroom beyond. He was dark and handsome, and, without being stout, had a certain sleek, comfortable appearance which gave an air of strength to the whole figure. There was nothing to find fault with in the man, or in his clothes, and yet some small irregularity of feature would have been welcome. He looked too neat, too self-possessed, too well-contented with himself.

His young wife was dressed in black, for since her marriage she had lost her mother. She was tall and slim and fair-haired. Her eyes were blue, her face refined, and her hands, long-fingered and white, were clasped together nervously. She glanced at the man in silence many times before she took courage and spoke what had been in her thoughts for some weeks.

He had been a successful author, full of interesting ideas, anxious to discuss literary politics, ambitious to get on in his profession — a being to look up to and respect, before she married him. The novels may have merely shown talent, not genius, the ideas may have been second-hand, the ambition simply vanity, but she could not know these things.

He had naturally frivoled during the Paris honeymoon, and she had been glad to feel that they were, for the time, equals; that they could play at being children, and laugh and be lazy, and let the serious side of life go by unrealized or forgotten. But the real secret of her love for him lay in her admiration of a superior intellect, her gladness at being

able to lean on a nature stronger than her own. To the young Scotch girl, her education seemed to begin when she met her future husband. While they waited till their house in London was ready for them (they had been hurriedly sum- moned from abroad by the news of her mother's illness), she realized a dull sense of her husband's lazy, indolent life and vapid conversation. She admitted to herself at last that he was a different man. She thought that, if she did not inspire him to work, she could at least encourage him.

"Gerald," she said, "you never write now."

He turned slowly; all his movements were deliberate. "No," he said.

"Why not?"

"I don't feel in the mood."

"Will the right mood return?"

"I suppose so."

"You don't seem to care." Her voice was sharp.

"Why should I?" he asked. "I am not hard up just now."

They had both money enough, the wife especially.

"But," she exclaimed, "you have already made a name. You cannot allow your reputation to grow rusty."

He laughed good-naturally. "Dear child, I can."

She flushed. "I want to rouse you," she continued. "I can't bear to see you forgetting your work, and all you lived in connection with it, for no reason."

"You are the reason. I love you instead."

"O, but that is awful, Gerald!" She rose and crossed the room. "I dare not be to blame for your loss of ambition. I dread the consequences for us both. O, I love you; don't be afraid. I worship yon quite foolishly, and you know I love you. But I also depend on your strength of character. I take pride in your genius, I admire your brain, just as I cling to the man who is everything in the world to me. I am not clever myself. I move in a small, narrow circle of people, well-bred,