mother and she would cluck over him like an old hen, and tell him he was the most grateful, the most affectionate, the most generous, and truly thoughtful of her children. He would gulp down her flattery and win back to self-deception, without which it had become impossible for him to face his wife, whom he was for ever pestering with absurd questions like "Do you love me?" "How much do you love me?" "Would anything ever make you cease to love me?" And when she replied as best she could with exaggerated demonstrations he hardly listened to her. . . . Truly in their relationship it was he who played the feminine part. When Jessie was with child he lied to himself about his son, saw himself building up a great firm for his inheritance, and from the very first moment being a hero to the little fellow. He began to feel irresistible and so tormented his wife with his swaggering that she protested by mentioning one or two awkward little facts. She brought down on herself such a storm of anger that her nerves gave way and she had a fit of hysteria. . . In a week she was brought to bed of a miscarriage. She was not very ill, but she suffered terribly, for Frederic hardly spoke a word to her for ten days, and then he arranged for her to go and stay at the sea alone, unless she chose to take one of her sisters with her. She would not do that and she went alone. He promised to spend Saturdays and Sundays with her, but at the end of each week he declared that it was impossible for him to get away. . . . He was hardly responsible for his actions. The most glorious fiction he had ever created had come toppling down and he was not altogether to blame for the breach which gaped so wide between himself and his wife that he could not avoid seeing it. She, too, had missed her opportunity, for she was so oppressed by the physical ugliness of the calamity that she was frozen by it and could not give him the warmth that might have saved him from still further floundering in the morass. . . . As it was, he was savagely resentful against her and missed not the pettiest occasion of hurting her. Under this treatment her love died almost without a struggle, so painlessly indeed that she attributed all her hurt and her agony to the discovery that came to her by the sea, that Frederic had never loved her. She saw that clearly and was instantly filled with dread lest she should betray herself and let him feel that she knew. . . . Every letter she wrote to him was carefully framed to convey a picture of herself as loyal, tender, devoted, proud, and--with the most cunning falsity of all--admiring. These letters soothed Frederic. He had found it difficult to admire his own brutality, though, as he moved further away from it, it was distorted by the prism of his vanity into something very like strength. That accomplished, it became an easy task to cover over the unpleasant fact of the disaster so that it became as a pearl upon his shell.