"I'm fond of you, Tommy, ever so. But I can't stand the life here; it smothers me. And we don't do anything; we don't get anywhere." "I don't know what you mean, Olivia; we're building up quite a business; we'll be able to make a payment this year, and as the town improves----" "Oh, Tommy, come away; come away into the world with me. Let us go out and do things; let us be part of things." "Higgleston's good enough for me. We're building up trade, and everybody says the town is sure to go ahead----" "Oh, Tommy, Tommy, what do I care about a business here if we lose the whole world--and we'll be old and gray before we get the business paid for. Oh, it isn't because I don't care about you, Tommy, because I am not satisfied with you; it is the glory of the world I want, and the wonder of Art, and great deeds going up and down in it! I want us to have that, Tommy; to have it together ... you and I, and not another. It's all there in the world, Tommy, all the colour and the splendour ... great love and great work ... let us go out and take it; let us go...." I had slipped down from his knees to my own as I talked, pleading with him, and I saw, by the light of the lamp from within, his face, charged with pained bewilderment, settle into lines of habitual resistance to the unknown, the unknowable. My voice trailed out into sobbing. "Of course, Olivia, I don't want to keep you if you are not happy here, but I have to stay myself." His voice was broken but determined, with the determination of a little man not seeing far ahead of him. "I have to keep the business together." I went, as it was foredoomed I should, about the middle of September. Sarah and I had been so fortunate as to get engagements together. My going, upheaving as it had been in respect to my own adjustments, made hardly a ripple in the life around me. Even Miss Rathbone failed to rise to her former heights, but was obliged to piece out her interest with her customary dressmaker's manner of having temporarily overlaid her absorption in your affair with an unwilling distraction. The rest of Higgleston received the announcement with the air of not supposing it to be any of their business, but that in any case they couldn't approve of it. Mrs. Harvey put a common feminine view of it very aptly. "I shouldn't think," she said, "your husband would let you." It was not a view that was likely to have a deterrent effect upon me. CHAPTER IX