There is no more vanity in calling yourself a woman of genius if you know what genius means, than might be premised of one of the guinea pigs set aside for experimentation in a laboratory; but the guinea pigs who run free in the garden impute it to us. I wrote my mother and Tommy what Eversley had said, but I knew they would see nothing more in it than that he had paid me a compliment which it would not be modest to make much of in public. The successes of that year prolonged the season by a month, and by the time I got home to Higgleston the leaves were all out on the maples and the wide old yards smelled of syringa. I came back to it full of the love of the world, alive in every fibre of my being, and the first thing I noticed was that it caused my husband some embarrassment. There was a shyness in his resumption of our relations more than could be accounted for by the native Taylorvillian gaucheries of emotion. "My dear," I protested, "you don't seem a bit glad to see me." "You are away so much," he excused. "You're getting to seem almost a stranger." "Getting? I should say I am. This morning it seemed to me almost as if I waked up in another woman's house." I meant no more than to suggest how little the walls of it, the furniture, the draperies, expressed my new mood of creative power, but suddenly I saw my husband colour a deep, embarrassed red. "You never did take any interest in our life here ... in the business ... in me." He seemed to be making out a case against me. "Don't say in you, Tommy; but the life here, yes; there is so little to it. Another year and Mr. Harding says I could hope to stay in Chicago." My husband pushed away his plate; we were at breakfast the second morning. "Higgleston's good enough for me," he protested. He got up and stood at the window with his back to me, looking out at the side street and the tardy traffic of the town beginning to stir in it. "When you hate it so," he said, "I wonder you come back to it." But my mood was proof against even this. "Oh, Thomas, Thomas!" I got my hands about his arm and snuggled my head against it. "And you can't even guess why I come back?" He looked at me, vaguely troubled by the caress, but not responding to it. "Do you care so much?" "Ever and ever so." I thought he was in need of reassurance. I hardly know when I began to get an inkling of what was wrong with him; it trickled coldly to me from dropped words, inflections, sidelong glances. Whenever I went out I was aware of all Higgleston watching, watching like a cat at a mouse-hole for something to come out. What? Reports of my success had reached them through the papers. Were they looking for some endemic impropriety to break out on me as a witness to what a popular actress must inevitably become? By degrees it worked through to me that all Higgleston knew things about my situation that were held from me. What they expected to see come out in my behaviour was the stripe of chastisement.