“What chapter, dear?” She leaned back over the chair, looking up in his face. “You know, I wish you’d let me share your work a little. I don’t know how many years we haven’t been married now, and you’ve always kept me outside it. A wife ought to know about it. Just at first you did tell me things a little and I was so frightfully interested. And I’m sure I could help you, dear. There are things a woman knows.” He smiled at the thought of the way that she would help him. He would never be able to show her the necessity of doing it all alone, both for him and for her. That part of his life he must keep to himself. He remembered that he had thought before their marriage that she would be able to help. She had seemed so ready to sympathise and understand. But he had speedily discovered the hopelessness of it. Not only was she of no assistance, but she even hindered him. She took the feeble, the bad parts of the book and praised; she handled his beautiful delicacy, the so admirably balanced sentences, the little perfect expressions that had flown to him from some rich Paradise where they had waited during an eternity of years for some one to use them—she had taken these rare treasures of his and trampled on them, flung them to the winds, demanded their rejection. She had never for a moment seen his work at all; the things that she had seen had not been there, the things that she had not seen were the only jewels that he possessed. The discovery had not pained him; he had not loved her for _that_, the grasping and sharing of his writing, but for the other things that were there for him, just as charmingly as before. But he could not bear to have his work touched by the fingers of those who did not understand. When people came and asked him about it and praised it just because it was the thing to do, he felt as though some one had flung some curtain aside and exposed his body, naked, to a grinning world. And it was this, in a lesser degree, that she did. She was only asking, like the rest, because it was the thing to do, because she would be able to say to the world that she helped him; she did not care for the thing, its beauty and solemnity and grace, she did not even see that it _was_ beautiful, solemn, or graceful. “Never mind my work, dear,” he said. “One wants to fling it off when one’s out of it. You don’t want to know about the book. Why, I don’t believe you’ve ever read ‘To Paradise’ right through; now, have you?” “Why, of course, I _loved_ it, although there _were_, as a matter of fact, things that I could have told you about women. Your heroine, for instance——” He interrupted hurriedly. “Well, dear, let’s go to bed now. We’ll talk to-morrow about anything you like.” He moved across the room. She looked angrily into the glass. She could feel that little choke in her throat and her eyes were burning. She tapped the table impatiently.