Ludlow assumed that she had said more. "Then if you don't think you ought to do it for that, do you think you ought to do it for nothing?" "For nothing?" Cornelia asked herself. Was there really nothing else, then? She stood looking at him, as if she were asking him that aloud. He was not so far off as when they began to talk, just after they had risen, and now he suddenly came much nearer still. "Are you going to drive me from you because I don't care for all this?" "You ought to care," she persisted. "But if I don't? If I can't? Then what is the reason you won't let it all be as if nothing had happened? Ah, I see! You can't forgive me for sending you his letter! Well, I deserve to be punished for that!" "No; I should have despised you if you hadn't----" "Well?" She was silent, looking at the floor. He put his arm round her, and pushed her head down on his shoulder. "Oh, how silly!" she said, with lips muted against his own. XXXIX. Cornelia and Ludlow were married at Pymantoning in the latter part of June, and he spent the summer there, working at a picture which he was going to exhibit in the fall. At the same time he worked at a good many other pictures, and he helped Cornelia with the things she was trying. He painted passages and incidents in her pictures, sometimes illustratively, and sometimes for the pleasure of having their lives blended in their work, and he tried to see how nearly he could lose his work in hers. He pretended that he learned more than he taught in the process, and that he felt in her efforts a determining force, a clear sense of what she wanted to do, that gave positive form and direction to what was vague and speculative in himself. He was strenuous that she should not, in the slightest degree, lapse from her ideal and purpose, or should cease to be an artist in becoming a wife. He contended that there was no real need of that, and though it had happened in most of the many cases where artists had married artists, he held that it had happened through the man's selfishness and thoughtlessness, and not through the conditions. He was resolved that Cornelia should not lose faith in herself from want of his appreciation, or from her own over-valuation of his greater skill and school; and he could prove to any one who listened that she had the rarer gift. He did not persuade her, with all his reasons, but her mother faithfully believed him. It had never seemed surprising to her that Cornelia should win a man like Ludlow; she saw no reason why Cornelia should not; and she could readily accept the notion of Cornelia's superiority when he advanced it. She was not arrogant about it; she was simply and entirely satisfied; and she was every moment so content with Cornelia's husband that Cornelia herself had to be a little critical of him in self-defence. She called him a dreamer and theorist; she ran him down to the Burtons, and said he would never come to anything, because