She sat down with a little sigh. "I'm going to have a cigarette." She drew out a thin silver case, opened it. "A teeny Russian one." Claude struck a match. She put the cigarette between her lips, and leaned forward to the tiny flame. "That's it." She sighed. After a moment of silence she said: "I'm glad you couldn't work in the little room. If you had been able to we should never have had this." "We!" thought Claude. "And," she continued, "I feel this is the beginning of great things for you. I feel as if, without meaning to, I'd taken you away from your path, as if now I understood better. But I don't think it was quite my fault if I didn't understand. Claudie, do you know you're terribly reserved?" "Am I?" he said. He shifted in his chair, took the cigar out of his mouth, and put it back again. "Well, aren't you? Two whole months, and you never told me you couldn't work." "I hated to, after you'd taken so much trouble with that room." "I know. But, still, directly you did tell me, I perfectly understood. I"--she spoke with distinct pressure--"I am a wife who can understand. Don't you remember that night at Jacques Sennier's opera?" "Yes." "Didn't I understand then? At the end when they were all applauding? I've got your letter, the letter you wrote that night. I shall always keep it. Such a burning letter, saying I had inspired you, that my love and belief had made you feel as if you could do something great if you changed your life, if you lived with me. You remember?" "Yes, Charmian, of course I remember." Claude strove with all his might to speak warmly, impetuously, to get back somehow the warmth, the impulse that had driven him to write that letter. But he remembered, too, his terrible desire to get that letter back out of the box. And he felt guilty. He was glad just then that Charmian had turned out those two burners. "In these months I think we seem to have got away from that letter, from that night." Claude became cold. Dread overtook him. Had she detected his lack of love? Was she going to tax him with it? "Oh, surely not! But how do you mean?" he broke in anxiously. "That was a special night. We were all on fire. One cannot always live at that high pressure. If we could we should wear ourselves out." "Yes, perhaps. But geniuses do live at high pressure. And you are a genius." At that moment the peculiar sense of being less than the average man, which is characteristic of greatly talented men in their periods of melancholy and reaction, was alive in Claude. Charmian's words intensified it. "If you reckon on having married a genius, I'm afraid you're wrong," he said, with a bluntness not usual in him. "It isn't that!" she said quickly, almost sharply. "But I can't forget things Max Elliot has said about you--long ago. And Madre thinks--I know that, though she doesn't say anything. And, besides, I have heard some of your things." "And what did you really think of them?" he asked abruptly.