"I wish you had read the book, and liked it," said Kent, speaking spontaneously. "Say you wish I'd read it?" replied his wife. "Oh, you'd like it, because it was mine. But I mean I wish----" "What?" "I don't know." She twisted a piece of his hair round her finger. "My taste is much maturer than it was," she averred, with satisfaction. "Somehow, I can't stand the sort of things that used to please me; I don't know how I was able to read them. They bore me now." He smiled. As she had often done to him before, she seemed a child masquerading in a woman's robes. "You're getting quite a critic!" "Well," she said happily, "you'll laugh, but I got _A Peacock's Tail_ from the library, and when the review in _The Chronicle_ came out, the reviewer said just what I'd felt about it. He did! I'm not such a silly as you think, you see." "My love!" he cried, "I never thought you were a 'silly.'" "Not very wise, though! Oh, I know what I lack, Humphrey; but I _am_ better than I was--I am really! Remember, I never heard literature talked about until I met you; it was all new to me when we married, and--if you've noticed it--you aren't very, _very_ interested in anything else. The longer we live together, the more--the nicer I shall be." He answered lightly: "You're nice enough now." But he was touched. After a long pause, as if uttering the conclusion of a train of thought aloud, she murmured: "Baby's got _your_ shaped head." "I hope to God it'll be worth more to him than mine to me!" he exclaimed. She was silent again. "What are you so serious for, all of a sudden?" he said, looking round. Cynthia bent over him quickly with a caress, and sprang up. "It was you who wanted the _t's_ crossed for once!" she said tremulously. "There, now I must go and knock at the nursery door and ask if I'm allowed to go in!" The man of acute perceptions wondered what she meant, and in what way he had shown himself dull at comprehending so transparent a girl.