Her pride in the room went through successive stages. In her first days of satisfaction in mere proprietorship of so respectable and worthy a possession, she took pleasure in unostentatious exhibition of it. She liked to take guests there, in a natural sort of way, and to be found sitting there, by unexpected callers. She liked the eminently admirable background of the rows of books, for social episodes. But as her knowledge of the library grew, that stage passed. As she went from familiarity to intimacy, she began to desire that it should be an exclusive intimacy. She no longer took callers to the room, and when familiar acquaintances found their way there, she was uneasy at their handling of the books and impatient of their discussion of them. She now seldom spontaneously took strangers there. In time she had come to group John with all the others. The only companionship that she desired in the library was an imagined one. John's attitude had more and more set her apart in this companionship. His dislike for the house had grown steadily more obvious as the months and years passed. It showed itself in a lack of home-pride, in open contempt for the old-fashioned elements of the place, in reluctance to make even necessary expenditure upon it. But Rachel herself had hardly guessed the strength of his feeling until one day when she discovered among Richard Hughes's papers what seemed to be a memorandum for a codicil to his will, which would make a gift of a thousand dollars to the little public library of the town. She took the note directly to John. 'I think we ought to do this,' she said. John looked at the paper and laid it down. 'I don't see that we are obliged to,' he answered shortly. 'It is what he intended to do--and we got the money,' she said, with too patient a manner, as if explaining the moral point to him. 'We should give it in his name.' 'It is enough to have to live in Richard Hughes's house. I don't care to set up a memorial for him besides.' 'But John,' she urged herself to argue, 'is it honest?' 'There is more than one kind of honesty,' said John shortly, in a tone which checked further answer. 'I can't afford it,' he added after a moment, as the final word. She left him in an anger which it seemed to her she would feel all her life. But gradually it became less an active feeling than a part of all her unformulated opinion of him. He had not followed her a single step in the development which had resulted from her awakening to the spirit of the house. In time he came to ignore the library altogether as part of the house, and by degrees fitted up an incongruous little lounging-place upstairs. Rachel came to regard his whole attitude toward the place and the man who had owned it as belonging to his mental and aesthetic plane; his jealous ingratitude seemed not a separate feeling, but only an element in his character.