"Well, then, if you feel that way----" The inference was plain that he didn't know in that case why I held on to it. "It has got into my blood, Helmeth. I can't explain, and I didn't realize until we got to talking of it, but I don't believe I could live away from it. It is with me as it is with you about your engineering." If I had a momentary qualm lest that last should be not quite disingenuous, it passed in the realization that the comparison hadn't come home to him. I remembered how Forester would have accepted the abnegation of my gift to his necessity of being important, and I didn't hold it out against Helmeth that he failed to realize at all the place that my work occupied, just as work, in the scheme of my existence. We came back to it the next day and the next. It would have been simpler, of course, if it hadn't been for the children, and for my being at one with him in the opinion that the stage wasn't the proper atmosphere for the rearing of young ladies. I was still of the opinion which was exemplified in so far as I knew it, by Pauline and Mrs. Franklin Shane, that the function of mothering could not go on except by complete separateness from the business of making a living. All my training and heredity had fostered an ideal of family life which rendered obligatory a proper house and servants, in the neighbourhood of good schools, and the exclusion from it of everybody but those who found themselves in an identical situation. And if we had been able to imagine a compromise, Helmeth and I would have been hindered by the defrauded capacity for loving, from working it out logically. At the mere suggestion of anything to drive us apart, the mating instinct set us toward one another irresistibly. We would leave off any argument and fall to kissing. We were pierced through and through with loving. "Let us not think of it any more; something will work out for us. Let us just be happy the way we are," I would protest. "Oh, child, child, will you never understand that the way we are is what is so hard to bear!" Then he would snatch me up until the suffusing fire of his caress would steal through all my body and sing in me like bacchic sap of vineyards in the spring. "You oughtn't to marry me unless you can't help yourself," he would laugh shamelessly. So we fell deeper in love and not out of our difficulties. Toward the end of that week, the weather which had been thickening to a storm, brought us to one of those thunderous London days, full of a stifling murk that might have been breathed out by the nostrils of the greasy, hurrying snake that went by in the bed of the river. Inconsequential lightnings flashed in the smoky vault, from every quarter of which rolled unrelated thunder.