Sometimes Barton’s voice sounded a great way off, and she confused his utterances with the winged ideas she had formulated into human language. Was she thinking it all out? or was _he_ enunciating what she _had_ thought through the languorous summer days and cool autumn evenings? She used to wonder, amusedly, what he supposed she did during the many hours she spent in solitude. He never asked, but if he had deemed the matter worthy of speculation, he might have reasoned that a woman who did not make her own clothes and had no taste for fancy work, whose house was well appointed and not large, and whose health was good must, with two servants to do housework and cooking, have much time upon her hands. “How do women occupy themselves who keep plenty of servants and do not write, paint, or study anything in particular?” asked the young son of a woman who kept house, wrote books, painted pictures, and studied with her children. “They make a profession of _horacide_!” answered the mother. Barton lowered the book so abruptly that his wife started and clasped her hands involuntarily. She was very weak. “I should like to know this man!” “What man?” “The fellow who wrote this book! He is a New York lawyer—that is plain. His insight of legal chicanery and his apt use of technical law terms show that, if his clever reasoning did not. A Columbia graduate, too! I’ll go bail for that. And a society man. By George! that narrows the case down pretty well. I don’t know a man at the city bar, though, who has sufficient literary skill to turn out such a piece of work as this. ‘John C. Hart’ is a pseudonym, of course—but there may be a meaning in it.” He fell into a muse over the title page, knotting his brows and plucking at his lower lip while he scanned the name. Agnes’ breath came quick; her head swam as in seasickness. She shook herself mentally and tried to speak as usual: “It may be another case of George Eliot, _alias_ Mary Anne Evans; or Charles Egbert Craddock, _alias_ Miss Murfree.” “Preposterous! There isn’t a feminine touch in the book. And no woman of the education and refinement of this writer could know anything of the scenes and motives he describes. Men can paint women faithfully. Women who try to depict men show us up as hybrids, creatures of their own sex disguised in masculine habiliments. Ready-made clothes at that, baggy at the knees and short at the wrists. I should _not_ like, however, to know a woman who could write ‘The Story of Walter King.’” “It does not impress me as coarse!” Agnes was nerved by instinctive resentment to say. “Not a symptom of coarseness about it. But it _is_ virile—and that your woman author ought never to be! Any man might be proud of having written this novel. Any true, modest woman would blush to be accused of it. You see the difference?” “_I_ see the difference between the patient I left three hours ago, and the one I find here now!” interjected the nurse bluntly.