The idea after all was a very simple one. But the probability is that, had she not been there to carry him through, Maxwell would have neither found it nor followed it. However that may be, in a very few days she had clothed it with fact, and made so real a thing of it that she was amazed at her own success. She and Maxwell had settled themselves in a small furnished house in the Mile End Road, and Maxwell was once more studying the problems of his measure that was to be in the midst of the populations to whom it applied. The house had been recently let in "apartments" by a young tradesman and his wife, well known to Marcella. In his artisan days the man had been her friend, and for a time her patient. She knew how to put her hand on him at once. They spent five months in the little house, while the London that knew them in St. James's Square looked on, and made the comments--half amused, half inquisitive--that the act seemed to invite. There was of course no surprise. Nothing surprises the London of to-day. Or if there were any, it was all Marcella's. In spite of her passionate sympathy with the multitude who live in disagreeable homes on about a pound a week, she herself was very sensitive to the neighbourhood of beautiful things, to the charm of old homes, cool woods, green lawns, and the rise and fall of Brookshire hills. Against her wish, she had thought of sacrifice in thinking of the Mile End Road in August. But there was no sacrifice. Frankly, these five months were among the happiest of her life. She and Maxwell were constantly together, from morning till night, doing the things that were congenial to them, and seeing the things that interested them. They went in and out of every factory and workshop in which certain trades were practised, within a three-mile radius; they became the intimate friends of every factory inspector and every trade-union official in the place. Luckily, Maxwell's shyness--at least in Mile End--was not of the sort that can be readily mistaken for a haughty mind. He was always ready to be informed; his diffident kindness asked to be set at ease; while in any real ardour of debate his trained capacity and his stores of knowledge would put even the expert on his mettle.