“Of course I understand!” he cried quickly. “You have to mix with people as a married woman, and you are a bit shy at first. But you'll pull through all right, dear. Why, as it is, you are superb.” “Oh, come,” she said, laughing. “I can talk to people without blushing and morally biting the corner of my apron. I meant something a little more subtle than that. You see, after all, you don't understand. I can never, never be Clytie Davenant again. She was buried for good and all at Bordighera.” “And my sweet phoenix has arisen out of her ashes,” said Thornton. “If you like--and the phoenix hasn't quite got the sense of her environment yet.” “All this is very pretty, my dear,” said Thornton, with a laugh. “But I can't quite see what we are driving at.” “Have I been talking such great nonsense, then? Perhaps it all tended to express the fact that when I am with you I don't think of myself; when we are apart I am confronted with myself, and feel embarrassed. You see, Thornton dear,” she went on, “I have lived a queer kind of life, full of such different hopes and dreams. I scarcely thought about marriage in those days. I knew that love would come to me some time or the other, but then it seemed as if it would all be mixed up with my art, whereas now----Oh, you can't see how different it is!” There was no tone of sadness or regret in her voice as she said this, but a touch of tenderness, a tribute, as it were, to his influence. “But there's nothing to hinder you from amusing yourself with painting pictures, is there?” asked her husband lightly. “You have no call now to earn a livelihood, but you can paint all day if you like, my dear.” “Of course I shall paint--I could not live without it--except perhaps such a month as last. But, don't you see, my art was once the guiding principle of my life. Now I have my art and my love, and they seem to have nothing to do with each other. They are on different planes, so to speak. It is all that that makes me feel I don't quite realise myself yet when I have to leave the love plane for a little.” “Don't leave it,” said Thornton. “Ah! we have done that by going away from Bordighera, and leading this dissipated life here,” she replied, laughing. “But we can get on and off whenever we like, you know. That is one comfort.” “Well,” said Thornton, lighting a cigarette, and speaking between the first few whiffs, “marriage must make some difference. You have lived a free and easy, emancipated life among artistic people, and now you belong to somebody else--a wild barbarian, who could no more tell you how to paint a picture than how to cut out a dress. Of course it makes a difference in your way of viewing things. It has made a difference in mine too, by Jove! When a yearning for Africa comes over me I have to say: No; I have a wife, with her arms,--the roundest in the world, my dear,--about my neck. And so I have got to settle down to politics and domesticity in the Cromwell Road.”