"You must stand it so long as I only seem to do it. He's far more manageable than I expected him to be. It's quite pathetic how docile he is, how perfectly ductile! But it won't do to browbeat him when he comes over here a little out of shape. He's a curious creature," Maxwell went on with a relish in Godolphin, as material, which his wife suffered with difficulty. "I wonder if he could ever be got into a play. If he could he would like nothing better than to play himself, and he would do it to perfection; only it would be a comic part, and Godolphin's mind is for the serious drama." Maxwell laughed. "All his artistic instincts are in solution, and it needs something like a chemical agent to precipitate them, or to give them any positive character. He's like a woman!" "Thank you," said Mrs. Maxwell. "Oh, I mean all sorts of good things by that. He has the sensitiveness of a woman." "Is that a good thing? Then I suppose he was so piqued by what I said about his skirt-dance that he will renounce you." "Oh, I don't believe he will. I managed to smooth him up after you went out." Mrs. Maxwell sighed. "Yes, you are very patient, and if you are patient, you are good. You are better than I am." "I don't see the sequence exactly," said Maxwell. They were both silent, and she seemed to have followed his devious thought in the same muse, for when he spoke again she did not reproach him with an equal inconsequence. "I don't know whether I could write a novel, and, besides, I think the drama is the supreme literary form. It stands on its own feet. It doesn't have to be pushed along, or pulled along, as the novel does." "Yes, of course, it's grand. That's the reason I can't bear to have you do anything unworthy of it." "I know, Louise," he said, tenderly, and then again they did not speak for a little while. He emerged from their silence, at a point apparently very remote, with a sigh. "If I could only know just what the feelings of a murderer really were for five minutes, I could out-Shakespeare Shakespeare in that play. But I shall have to trust to the fall of man, and the general depravity of human nature, I suppose. After all, there's the potentiality of every kind of man in every man. If you've known what it is to hate, you've known what it is to kill." "I felt once as if I had killed _you_," she said, and then he knew that she was thinking of a phase of their love which had a perpetual fascination for them both. "But I never hated you." "No; I did the hating," he returned, lightly. "Ah, don't say so, dear," she entreated, half in earnest.