"The very few women that she met were actresses, who talked of nothing but their careers--their genius, their wrongs, and their Press notices. What companion could she find among them, even had I wished her to seek their companionship? And the men who came to us also talked shop continuously, and directed themselves chiefly to _me_. No doubt they would have had enough, and too much, to say to her had I been absent, but, as it was, they often appeared to forget that she was there. As time went on, too, the theatre made more and more demands upon me--a comedy in rehearsal while another was being written; the telephone bell always ringing to call me away just when I had arranged to take a half-holiday with her. And when I left the theatre I could not dismiss the anxieties of a production from my mind as I had dismissed the affairs of the Magasins when I left my office stool--they were mine, and I brought them home with me. She grew bored, restless. She was nervy with solitude, and chagrined at feeling herself insignificant. She told me one day that she wanted me to put her on the stage. "Mon Dieu! To begin with, she had no gift for the stage--and if she had been ever so clever, did I want to see her there? I was aghast. "'But, mignonne,' I said, 'what makes you think, all of a sudden, you could act? Leaving everything else aside, what reason is there to suppose you would succeed? You have had no experience, you have never even shown the slightest tendency towards it.' "'I want something to do,' she said. "'But,' I said,' that isn't enough. And besides, you would not like it at all--you would find it odious. You sit in a box and you see a celebrated woman bringing the house down, and to be an actress looks to you very fine. But she has been half a lifetime arriving at celebrity--there is nothing fine about the journey to it. You would feel that you had given up a good deal, I assure you--a dramatist's wife in the box is a much more dignified figure than a dramatist's wife rehearsing a trivial part and being corrected by the stage-manager.' "'I did not mean trivial parts,' she said disconsolately--and I realised for the first time that she had been dreaming of a début in the principal rôle. But she let the discussion drop, and I half thought I had convinced her. "I was very much mistaken. A few weeks later she referred to it again, and more urgently. She seemed to imagine that her project was a perfectly simple matter for me to arrange, that the only obstacle in the way was my personal objection to it. 'What you say about trivial parts is quite true,' she acknowledged, with an air of being extremely reasonable, 'but in one of your own pieces you could easily get me lead. Everybody wants plays from you now; you would only have to say that you wished me to be engaged. Of course, I should study; I should go to a professor of diction and take lessons.'