An event that she did not foresee, however, happened shortly afterward. A week came when Harlindew spent almost no time with her. He disappeared into his room early; at breakfast he seemed to have slept little, and he was distracted and irritable. When the time came to go downtown, she felt that he resented it. He would dawdle and temporize and start off anywhere from a quarter to a half hour late. The secrecy of his movements were a trial to her, and she could not get anything out of him by casual questioning. His answers were indirect, hinting at work. Then her questioning stopped. She realized that she was growing angry; malicious impulses came to her, a desire for petty revenge, and all this warned her that she was vainer than she had believed. She depended upon his attentions, his love-making, his continual amusing flattery. That was the unfairness of marriage, she argued. It taught you to expect certain things you had got on very well without before. But if your single mate withheld them, you could not go elsewhere to supply them.... After six days of this, Moira began to believe herself a philosopher, and something of a cynic as well. She had kept her temper, but she had also been experimenting with the green serpent of disillusionment. The thing ended with a visit to her bedroom at two in the morning. He was a little excited by liquor, a most unusual thing since their marriage, yet she was sure he had not been away. Most of this excitement came from another cause. He held in his hand a half a dozen sheets of paper and began without preliminaries to read them to her. They were new poems, of course--how stupid she had been not to suspect it! When he had finished reading them she snatched them from him with cries of delight and read them herself. “I have to see the words--the blessed words!” she declared. He walked out of the room, leaving the crinkly papers with her, walked on air yet timorously, jumping half out of his boots at every slight noise she made with the sheets. When he came back he found tear-drops clinging to her lashes. She was still reading the poems as though to fix them then and there in her mind. She laid back on the pillows and asked him to read them all over himself aloud, and “very slowly.” It was a long moment after he had ended that she spoke. “They’re better than anything you’ve done,” she said, with a contentment that filled him with torturing pangs of delight. “As good and better than the best in your book. It’s come back to you, Miles, I always knew it would. Oh, isn’t it wonderful!” He sat down, suddenly downcast and sheepish in the midst of his elation. “But if this is going to happen to me often, what am I going to do?” he said. “I’ve lived those things. It’s been hell and heaven, Moira. I took two afternoons off from the office. I had to. It was all but impossible to go.”