A sharpness came into the voice of the speaker. He turned to McGregor and talked vigorously like one making a defence. “My woman was a good enough sort,” he said. “I suppose loving is an art like writing a book or drawing pictures or making violins. People try to do it and don't succeed. In the end we threw the job up and just lived together like most people do. Our lives got mussy and meaningless. That's how it was. “Before she married me my wife had been a stenographer in a factory that made tin cans. She liked that work. She could make her fingers dance along the keys. When she read a book at home she didn't think the writer amounted to much if he made mistakes about punctuation. Her boss was so proud of her that he would brag of her work to visitors and sometimes would go off fishing leaving the running of the business in her hands. “I don't know why she married me. She was happier there and she is happier back there now. We got to walking together on Sunday evenings and standing under the trees on side streets, kissing and looking at each other. We talked about a lot of things. We seemed to need each other. Then we got married and started living together. “It didn't work out. After we had been married a few years things changed. I don't know why. I thought I was the same as I had been and I think she was. We used to sit around quarrelling about it, each blaming the other. Anyway we didn't get along. “We would sit on the little front porch of our house in the evening, she bragging of the work she had done in the can factory and I dreaming of quietude and a chance to work on the violins. I thought I knew a way to increase the quality and beauty of tone and I had that idea about varnish I have talked to you about. I even dreamed of doing things those old fellows of Cremona didn't do. “When she had been talking of her work in the office for maybe a half hour she would look up and find that I hadn't been listening. We would quarrel. We even quarrelled before the children after they came. Once she said that she didn't see how it would matter if no violins had ever been made and that night I dreamed of choking her in bed. I woke up and lay there beside her thinking of it with something like real satisfaction in just the thought that one long hard grip of my fingers would get her out of my way for good. “We didn't always feel that way. Every little while a change would come over both of us and we would begin to take an interest in each other. I would be proud of the work she had done in the factory and would brag of it to men coming into the shop. In the evening she would be sympathetic about the violins and put the baby to bed to let me alone at my work in the kitchen.