But even this double barrier of outward isolation from the Augusta who was his was not the great thing that he feared. The look which he had seen in Augusta's face in the days when they were hunting the city for her mother, that strained, listening look that took her away from him and from everything about them, was often in her eyes now. Somehow he knew that in it she spoke to the spirit of Rose Wilding that wandered in the unknown places. He did not resent the state of things. But he found himself unaccountably peevish and unwontedly tempted to self pity. He did not know what was coming upon him. Would not have believed it if he had been told. He knew that they were bad days for him. They were days in which he sat pounding out useless hours at the typewriter, only to destroy the work as soon as he had done it. They were nights when he worked feverishly, bitterly at the jokes and skits that were at once his bread and butter and the bane of his soul. He came to hate the mere thought of writing at all. He was a failure. Even the things that he could do, the hated jokes that until now had brought him enough for a living, were now failing him. He was not making enough to afford to take Augusta and her mother away from this big house. And the thought that Augusta in the face of all her burdens was obliged to keep it to support her mother and herself, while he barely paid his board drove him frantic. One day in the middle of the winter he climbed to the coop in the fourth story of the old building in Bleecker street where the presses were complaining over the last edition of the afternoon. He had been walking nearly all day, climbing stairs in increasing discouragement and going down them again with a certain sickly relief. He was, in short, looking for work. Six months before he would have sworn that he would never again have to go back to the treadmill of routine work. He had been so sure that he could sit his whole life, if necessary, and turn out stories and scraps enough to give him the money he needed. He had deliberately planned for himself a life in which he would earn just enough to live in his own way, giving himself the time to think and work upon the books that he wanted to write. His marriage had changed his plan of life. He did not propose that Augusta and her mother should be dependent upon the girl's work and the house. It did not occur to him that Augusta was not, and did not intend to be, dependent upon him for a living. There was, of course, a living in the house for herself and her mother, as there had always been. But that was not Wardwell's way of looking at the matter. Augusta was his wife. And it was his immediate business to begin earning enough money for all three of them.