In the early days how well he remembered Clare's enthusiasm--a little extravagant, it seemed now. Then during the first year of their married life she had wanted to know everything about the making of “The Stone House.” It was almost as though it had been a cake or a pie, and he knew that he had found her questions difficult to answer and that he had had it driven in upon him that it was not really because she was interested in the subtleties of his art that she enquired but because of her own personal affection for him; if he had been making boots or a suit of clothes it would have been just the same. Then when “The Stone House” appeared her eagerness for its success had been tremendous--there was nothing she would not do to help it along--but that, he somewhat ironically discovered, was because she liked success and the things that success brought. Then when the book had not succeeded--or only so very little--her interest had, of a sudden, subsided. “Oh! I suppose you've got to go and do your silly old writing ... I think you might come out with me just this afternoon. It isn't often that I ask anything of you....” He did not believe that she had ever really finished “The Stone House.” She pretended that she had--“the end was simply perfect,” but she was vague, nebulous. He found the marker in her copy, some fifty pages before the end. She was so easily impressed by every one whom she met that perhaps the laughing attitude of Cards to Peter's books had something to do with it all. Cards affected to despise anything to do with work, here to-day, gone to-morrow--let us eat and drink ... dear old Peter, grubbing away upstairs--“I say, Mrs. Westcott, let's go and rag him....” And then they had come and invaded his room at the top of the house, and sometimes he had been glad and had flung his work down as though it were of no account ... and then afterwards, in the middle of some tea-party he had been suddenly ashamed, deeply, bitterly ashamed, as though he had actually wounded those white pages lying up there in his quiet room. He was at this time, like a man jostled and pushed and turned about at some riotous fair; looking, now this way, now that, absorbed by a thousand sights, a thousand sounds--and always through it all feeling, bitterly in his heart, that something dear to him, somewhere in some place of silence, was dying-- Well, hang it all, at any rate there was the Child! II At any rate there was the Child!