"But won't the critics hate that?" she asked seriously. Hubert Brett, for a man who had been almost too kindly reviewed, was always very hard on critics. "Now listen," he said, "and I'll tell you something. The public has a natural suspicion of literary criticism. It only reads the stuff to see what to avoid. If it sees some book is called sincere, painstaking, artistic, a masterpiece, or anything like that, it passes on until it comes to something labelled crude and elementary. Then it gets out its library list. Think of the two best-selling novelists to-day, and then think what the critics say of them! They are a journalistic joke. Yes, the more the dear critics hurl abuse, the more the darling public rushes out to Boot's. I'm sick of good reviews and rotten sales. I'm not doing it because I married you, not I; but I want columns of abuse and half a million copies!" She loathed it, always, when he talked like this. She never knew quite what he meant. She hoped he was not really writing a pot-boiler. "No, but honestly," she said, "why are things worse than in the old days? Your books sell just as well. Do tell me or I shall ask Ruth." "Well," he said, but this time without rancour, merely telling her what she had asked, "you see a house, even a hen-run like ours, always costs ever so much more than rooms--rates and things like servants, don't you see--and then Ruth used to make a bit with curious bazaar stuff all gummed on to tins." It was a mere backwash of his thought, as he drew the question out to a solution--nothing more. He never thought of a comparison. Why, if the thing had ever come to that, Helena had her allowance.... But it went home to her, whose early days had bred a diffidence to die only with the years. Ruth had helped him, then! "I wish _I_ could do something," she said. "I feel so useless!" She had forgotten her bold attack with which this dialogue had started, and her whole mind was filled now with its self-reproach. Hubert felt a sudden shame. The words threw back his memory to those first hours in London when the vast City crowd had made her say; "It makes me feel so useless!" Dear little girl, what happy, jolly days she had brought to his life since then! And yet she thought that she was useless.... She seemed so upset. His one idea was consolation. She must not think he longed for Ruth again, in even one respect! Perhaps at a less flustered time he might have thought of all that she did in the house; those charming little meals, hot always at however variable times; the pretty bowls of flowers; everything so dainty--green and white--so different from the grimy lodgings. But now he did not think of that. He took her arm instinctively in his and spoke what came into his mind. "Dear little girlie," he said kindly, "I love you to be useless." But she was not consoled. CHAPTER VIII A SCENE IN THE HOME