"Horrid depressing thing!" the reflected. "And yet . . how attractive! The general character of it is rather like Eldred himself. I suppose I could produce nothing that wasn't at this stage! They are both up-hill subjects, certainly; worth tackling; and not to be mastered in a day." But for all that she was little used to wrestling with her art. The touch of genius in her was of the spontaneous, rather than of the painstaking order; and a remembered word of Michael's rose up to disconcert her. "Succumb to your womanhood and there is an end of your Art." Irritating man! What business had he to make random shots so near to the truth. Yet it was not the whole truth; and hers was the chance to prove it. Certainly for the past six months and more, she had succumbed unreservedly to her womanhood; had endured without a pang the temporary eclipse of her art. What need to strive after the presentation, the expression of life, when she had penetrated to the core of it: was living it buoyantly, fervently, with every faculty of heart and spirit? By nature a being of extremes, she was apt to fling all her energies in one direction at a time: and in these last months of so-called idleness she had been mastering the rudiments of the finest and most complex of all arts,--the art of living in closest human relationship with 'a creature of equal, if of unlike frailties'; an art that must be mastered afresh, year by year: because life, as we know it, is rooted in change; and if a husband and wife are not imperceptibly growing towards one another, they are almost infallibly growing in the other direction. But for the artist woman self-surrender is no natural instinct: it is a talent to be consciously acquired, if she ever acquire it at all: and although Quita had, in some sort, been through the fire, she was still a novice in those 'profound and painless lessons of love,' that can only be taught in the incomparable school of marriage. Meanwhile, she was learning her husband,--in his own phrase,--like a new language; and enjoying the process, despite its undeniable difficulty. For the man was by temperament inarticulate, and a solitary: propensities aggravated by six years of bitterness, and stifled passion. Let his love be never so deep and true, the spell of isolation, the spirit that drives men into the wilderness, was as strong in him as the need to share thought and feeling with the heart nearest her own was in his wife. At no time could he have been classed among the frankly unthinking men who slip into marriage as composedly as they slip into a new suit of clothes: and at five-and-thirty, the complete readjustment of life and habit demanded by this exquisite yet exacting bond could not be arrived at without some degree of conscious strain and compromise.