The more irritatingly unbearable, too, it was because of the excellence of Ida's qualities--qualities he had taken humorously before marriage, but which later he had to take seriously. He began to hate her constant and intimate possession of his motives and tastes, her inquiries as to what he ate for lunch, and whether he considered his flannels quite adequate. He childishly resented her little nagging economies--and especially because he knew they were generally necessary. He chafed at the practical, sensible view he was argued resolutely into on every matter. What made it hard was that Haldane could not decently account for his revulsion of feeling toward Ida, now she was his wife. Worse than all, he saw how lightly she held in esteem his music--his one real love. To her it was a graceful trade to earn a living by--nothing else. And when she finally made it out that in his position in the orchestra he was likely never to rise much higher, unconsciously the fiddling seemed to her rather more of a small business. She told him he ought to be more ambitious. One night Haldane had played to Ida--he resented so her name Ida--parts of the score of a light opera he had been at work on for years;--he would never play it on the boarding-house piano. The moment was as vivid for Haldane now as it was then. He could hear again her brisk cheerful voice when he had finished and was waiting--more hopeful than he had ever yet been with her: "That's _pretty_. It's funny--isn't it, dear?--to think you made it up out of your own head. I never _could_ understand--Leonard, have you got entirely rid of your sore throat?--Why don't you try to sell some of your little tunes?" The disappointment of it all, for an instant, had brought angry tears to his eyes. He remembered now just the bitter hopelessness of feeling how she had failed him--and the remembrance hurt anew. That night he had seen almost clearly how it was to be with him and her in all the years to come. There was, in Haldane's subsequent attitude toward the question of his marriage to Ida Locke, nothing worth the name of heroic. Indeed, looked at from the commonplace, critical standpoint, the situation was not so bad. It was Haldane's personal conception of it which caused the difficulty. Probably it was his sense of fairness to _her_ which made him accept matters quietly--as he did accept them. It was his comfort to-day, out of all the ruck of his artificial self-reproach, that Ida had never known--as he said--how he felt toward her. "She never knew," he repeated often, "she never knew. She couldn't, I'm sure. Thank God for that!"