ority who are "neither for God nor
for His enemies." Life had done this to him--life and Virginia. It was
not only that he had "grown soft," as he would have expressed it, nor
was it even wholly that he had grown selfish, for the canker which ate
at the roots of his personality had affected not his character merely,
but the very force of his will. Though the imperative he obeyed had
always been not "I must," but "I want," his natural loftiness of purpose
might have saved him from the results of his weakness had he not lost
gradually the capacity for successful resistance with which he had
started. If only in the beginning she had upheld not his inclinations,
but his convictions; if only she had sought not to soothe his weakness,
but to stimulate his strength; if only she had seen for once the thing
as it was, not as it ought to have been----

He was buried in his work now, and there were months during this year
when she appeared hardly to see him, so engrossed, so self-absorbed had
he become. Sometimes she would remember, stifling the pang it caused,
the nights when he had written his first plays in Matoaca City, and that
he had made her sit beside him with her sewing because he could not
think if she were out of the room. Now, he could write only when he was
alone; he hated an interruption so much that she often let the fire go
out rather than open his closed door to see if it was burning. If she
went in to speak to him, he laid his pen down and did not take it up
again while she was there. Yet this change had come so stealthily that
it had hardly affected her happiness. She had grown accustomed to the
difference before she had realized it sufficiently to suffer. Sometimes
she would say to herself a little wonderingly, "Oliver used to be so
romantic;" for with the majority of women whose marriages have
surrendered to an invasion of the commonplace, she accepted the
comfortable theory that the alteration was due less to circumstances
than to the natural drying of the springs of sentiment in her husband's
character. Occasionally, she would remember with a smile her three days'
jealousy of Abby; but the brevity and the folly of this had established
her the more securely in her impregnable position of unquestioning
belief in him. She had started life believing, as the women of her race
had believed for ages before her, that love was a divine gift which came
but once in a lifetime, and which, coming once, remained forever
i