One thing I gathered from his letters, that in the preoccupation and haste of his stay in New York he had wholly missed the significance of my new entanglement with Morris Polatkin. I have to suppose, to account for his never having any other conception of what my work was to me, that he had never known a professional woman or one who worked at anything except as a stop-gap between the inconsequence of youth and marriage. He felt himself, humbly, rather a poor substitute for the colour, the excitement and gayety of my career--why should so many people suppose that an actress's life is gay--but he balanced that with what he meant to purchase for me by his own achievement. He had, without thinking it necessary to account for it, the idea that is so generally and unexcusedly entertained that I am sometimes hypnotized into thinking it must be the right one, that a woman in becoming a man's wife ceases to be her own and becomes somehow mysteriously and inevitably his. It was not that in all our talk about it, he had any conclusions about the stage as an unsuitable profession for women, but that he was inherently unable to think of it as possible for his wife. We were saved from dispute by the proof I had had in Italy that his inability to think of me as having a life apart, arose chiefly in his need of me, which had in it something of the absolute quality of a child's need of its mother. I am glad now, in view of all that came of it, that I was spared the bitterness of not seeing, in his inability to accept the finality of my relation to my work, anything nobler than an insufferable male egotism.