“One mustn’t expect you to be the same person that you were three months ago, George,” she began, with a very humble, deprecating manner. “Otherwise I would ask you why we don’t hear of your coming to the front as a writer, as we heard then there was a probability of your doing.” George laughed with the same maddening indifference to his deterioration, and asked if he might smoke. With a cigarette between his lips, flourishing before her eyes the privilege of a man, he felt more of a man’s commanding position. “I haven’t come to the front,” said he, “because I haven’t made any steps at all, either forward, backward, or in any direction. I’ve been lazy, Ella, miserably, culpably lazy, and if my great thoughts have not yet stirred the world, it is no doubt only because they have not been committed to paper.” “Oh, if you are satisfied, of course that is everything. Ambition, I see, is not the great, never pausing, never ceasing motive-power that we poor foolish women are taught to believe; it is a pretty whim, to be taken up alternately with a fit of smoking, or mountain-climbing, as we girls change about between tennis and tatting.” “Not quite, Ella,” said George, doing her the justice to grow serious when he saw how deeply and unselfishly she was in earnest. “Ambition does not die for lying a short time hidden by other feelings; and surely even if it loses a little of its bitter keenness, it gains by being no longer wholly selfish.” “A beautiful answer, at least. And no doubt contentment is better than ambition.” “I don’t know what contentment is, except by seeing it in the faces of cows and pigs. No passion could be stifled by such a tepid feeling as that. I am not contented, I am happy. So will you be some day, and you will let your bright wits rest a little while, and you will understand.” Understand? No, she felt that was impossible, as she looked down at the big, handsome man sitting on the hammock below her, his eyes bright, not with serene, but with ardent happiness, content to bend all his faculties to the will of a creature whom he must know to be his inferior in every way. She did not wish to understand such a decadence as that. “Then you will give up all idea of writing?” “No. I am more anxious to distinguish myself than ever, as things have turned out. A man who suddenly finds himself to be married to a rich wife feels as if he had got off at a false start, and is put at a disadvantage. But so far I own my wife has taken up all my time. You see, she didn’t know she was going to be rich any more than I did, and being hardly more than a child, she wants as much looking after at first as a baby at the edge of a pond.” “And this is the sort of woman who gets a man’s best love!” thought Ella half bitterly, half disdainfully. “And of course you choose her friends for her,” suggested Ella, not quite hiding her feeling.