see me so quickly. Only on a day like this London does just lie heavily upon one doesn't it? and one just longs for the country—”
A little breath of a sigh escaped from her and she looked through her window at the dim chimneys, the clouds hanging like consolidated smoke, the fine, thin dust that filtered the air.
“You're looking tired yourself, Peter. Working too hard?”
“No,” he shook his head. “The work hasn't been coming easily at all. I suppose I've been too conscious, lately, of the criticisms every one made about ‘The Stone House.’ I don't believe one ought really to listen to anybody and yet it's so hard not to, and so difficult to know whose opinion one ought to take if one's going to take anybody's. I wish,” he suddenly brought out, “Henry Galleon were still alive. I could have followed him.”
“But why follow anybody?”
“Ah! that's just it. I'm beginning to doubt myself and that's why it's getting so difficult.”
Her eyes searched his face and she saw, at once, that he was in very real trouble. He looked younger, just then, she thought, than she had ever seen him, and she felt herself so immensely old that she could have taken him into her arms and mothered him as though he'd been her own son.
“There are a lot of things the matter,” she said. “Tell me what they all are.”
“Well,” he said slowly, “I suppose it's all been mostly my own fault—but the real difficulty is that I don't seem to be able to run the business of being married and the business of writing together. I don't think Clare in the least cares now about my writing—she almost resents it; she cared at first when she thought that I was going to make a huge success of it, but now—”
“But, of course,” said Miss Monogue, “that success comes slowly—it must if it's going to be any use at all—”
“Well, she doesn't see that. And she wants me to go out to parties and play about all the time—and then she doesn't want me to be any of the things that I was before I met her. All my earlier life frightens her—I suppose,” he suddenly ended, “I want her to be different and she
