They never had been quite her own sensations in this second volume. Those were so extremely dull! No, they had been those of some one like herself: a young wife with a busy husband, some one who felt a fool and wanted not to, wanted very much, but he quite liked it really----oh yes, sometimes, the first day or two, she felt a cad. Hubert really wasn't the least bit like that; it was all over-done; but she supposed that it was easier--he always said it was--if you exaggerated than if you just kept to the truth. It all seemed rather horrid, somehow. She thought about tearing up the book. And then--just about the time of the Kit Kat affair--began the real, astounding, secret. Virginia, as she called the wife inwardly (for it was all in the first person)--Virginia began to grow! It was not Helena's own moods and feelings now that went upon the paper: something endlessly more thorough, more intense, more--well, Helena's own word was "sloppy." Frankly she despised Virginia. That scene about the Kit Kats came into her diary (it was not Helena's), quite different, about a different thing in fact, and more hysterical. She hoped she would not end up like Virginia! Yet in a way she saw herself there too, just as beneath the husband she could detect ever so cruel a parody of Hubert in his most naughty moments.... But oh, what fun it was! When Hubert got up nowadays with some remark like; "Well, _I_ must do my work!" she no longer felt lonely or out in the cold or inferior or anything. She just said to herself: "And so must I." It was too splendid, having secrets. She told nobody; not even Ally, who liked her to be ambitious. No, it was her secret. CHAPTER XIV WAS IT WORTH WHILE? Love in a cottage is admittedly no failure, quite delightful; but those who have tried it usually end by owning that love in comfort would be no less charming. So it was with Hubert. Nobody, he told himself, could be a better little housekeeper than Helena, no little home more fresh and dainty than their own: but though she never worried him, cleverly adapting their ways to a variable income, he was always faced by the uncomfortable thought: "If this book fails--" or "unless I write some short stories--" and after a while these things begin to tell. Within two years from marriage they had told upon Hubert Brett. And so had come into being that pot-boiler, confessed to Helena with such solemnity on the wide, prudent, spaces of the Heath.