“Ah, nothing shall ever hurt _him!_” He told me more about his wife before we arrived at the gate of his house, and if it be thought that he was querulous, I am afraid I must admit that he had some of the foibles as well as the gifts of the artistic temperament; adding, however, instantly, that hitherto, to the best of my belief, he had very rarely complained. “She thinks me immoral--that’s the long and short of it,” he said, as we paused outside a moment, and his hand rested on one of the bars of his gate; while his conscious, demonstrative, expressive, perceptive eyes,--the eyes of a foreigner, I had begun to account them, much more than of the usual Englishman,--viewing me now evidently as quite a familiar friend, took part in the declaration. “It’s very strange, when one thinks it all over, and there’s a grand comicality in it which I should like to bring out. She is a very nice woman, extraordinarily well behaved, upright and clever, and with a tremendous lot of good sense about a good many matters. Yet her conception of a novel--she has explained it to me once or twice, and she does n’t do it badly, as exposition--is a thing so false that it makes me blush. It is a thing so hollow, so dishonest, so lying, in which life is so blinked and blinded, so dodged and disfigured, that it makes my ears burn. It’s two different ways of looking at the whole affair,” he repeated, pushing open the gate. “And they are irreconcilable!” he added, with a sigh. We went forward to the house, but on the walk, half way to the door, he stopped, and said to me, “If you are going into this kind of thing, there’s a fact you should know beforehand; it may save you some disappointment. There’s a hatred of art, there’s a hatred of literature!” I looked up at the charming house, with its genial color and crookedness, and I answered, with a smile, that those evil passions might exist, but that I should never have expected to find them there. “Oh, it doesn’t matter, after all,” he said, laughing; which I was glad to hear, for I was reproaching myself with having excited him.