He had endeavoured, in the novels that they read together during the honeymoon, to cultivate her appreciation of what was fine; for she had told him some of her favourite authors and he had shuddered. She had obtained a book for herself one day, and offered it to him. He had thanked her, but said that he was sure by the title that he wouldn't care for it. She answered that it was very silly and unliterary--she had acquired that word--to judge a book by what it was called. She was surprised at him! If _she_ had done such a thing, he would have ridiculed her. And, apart from that, she did not see that "Winsome Winnie" _was_ a bad title. What was the matter with it? Kent said he could not explain. She declared with a little triumphant laugh that that just showed how wrong he was. He made his endeavour very tenderly. To be looked upon as the schoolmaster abroad was a constant dread with him when he discovered that, to effect a similarity of taste between them, either she must advance, or he must regress. Sometimes--very occasionally--he handed her a passage with an air of taking it for granted that the pleasure would be mutual, but her assent was always so constrained that he was forced to realise that the cleverness of expression was lost upon her, that to her the word-painting had painted nothing at all. He wondered if his wife's dulness of vision fairly represented the eyes with which the novel-reading public read, and if it was folly to spend an hour revising a paragraph in which the majority would, after all, see no more artistry than if it had been allowed to remain as it was written first. He knew that it was folly, in a man like himself, with whom literature was a profession, and not a luxury, though he was aware at the same time that he would never be able to help it--that to the end there would be nights when he went up to bed having written no more than a hundred words all day, and yet went up with elation, because, rightly or wrongly, he felt the hundred words to have been admirably said. He knew that there would be evenings in the future, as there had been in the past, when, after reading a page of a master's prose with delight, he would go and tear up five sheets of his own manuscript with disgust. And he knew already--though he shrank from admitting this--that when it happened he would never be able to confess it to Cynthia, as he had done to Turquand, because Cynthia would find it absurd. The fortnight was near its conclusion, and both looked forward with eagerness to the return to England. He would plunge into his work; she would be near The Hawthorns, and have friends to come to see her. Neither of the pair regretted the step that they had taken; each loved the other; but a honeymoon was a trying institution, viewed as a whole.