d her conception of what was right in
drawing-room chairs and in marriage ceremonial and in every relation of
life with a simple and luminous honesty and conviction, with an immense
unimaginative inflexibility--as a tailor-bird builds its nest or a
beaver makes its dam.

Let me hasten over this history of disappointments and separation. I
might tell of waxings and waning of love between us, but the whole was
waning. Sometimes she would do things for me, make me a tie or a pair
of slippers, and fill me with none the less gratitude because the things
were absurd. She ran our home and our one servant with a hard, bright
efficiency. She was inordinately proud of house and garden. Always, by
her lights, she did her duty by me.

Presently the rapid development of Tono-Bungay began to take me into the
provinces, and I would be away sometimes for a week together. This she
did not like; it left her "dull," she said, but after a time she began
to go to Smithie's again and to develop an independence of me. At
Smithie's she was now a woman with a position; she had money to
spend. She would take Smithie to theatres and out to lunch and talk
interminably of the business, and Smithie became a sort of permanent
weekender with us. Also Marion got a spaniel and began to dabble with
the minor arts, with poker-work and a Kodak and hyacinths in glasses.
She called once on a neighbour. Her parents left Walham Green--her
father severed his connection with the gas-works--and came to live in a
small house I took for them near us, and they were much with us.

Odd the littleness of the things that exasperate when the fountains of
life are embittered! My father-in-law was perpetually catching me in
moody moments and urging me to take to gardening. He irritated me beyond
measure.

"You think too much," he would say. "If you was to let in a bit with
a spade, you might soon 'ave that garden of yours a Vision of Flowers.
That's better than thinking, George."

Or in a torrent of exasperation, "I CARN'T think, George, why you don't
get a bit of glass 'ere. This sunny corner you c'd do wonders with a bit
of glass."

And in the summer time he never came in without performing a sort of
conjuring trick in the hall, and taking cucumbers and tomatoes from
unexpected points of his person. "All out o' MY little bit," he'd say
in exemplary tones. He left a trail of vegetable produce in the most
unusual places, on mantel boards, sideboards, the tops of pic