An Irishman of real ability, he had started life
with high ideals and a belief that he could live with them. He had hoped
to serve Art, to keep his service pure; but, having one day let his acid
temperament out of hand to revel in an orgy of personal retaliation, he
had since never known when she would slip her chain and come home
smothered in mire. Moreover, he no longer chastised her when she came.
His ideals had left him, one by one; he now lived alone, immune from
dignity and shame, soothing himself with whisky. A man of rancour, meet
for pity, and, in his cups, contented. He had lunched freely before
coming to Blanca's Christmas function, but by four o'clock, the gases
which had made him feel the world a pleasant place had nearly all
evaporated, and he was suffering from a wish to drink again. Or it may
have been that this girl, with her soft look, gave him the feeling that
she ought to have belonged to him; and as she did not, he felt, perhaps,
a natural irritation that she belonged, or might belong, to somebody
else. Or, again, it was possibly his natural male distaste for the works
of women painters which induced an awkward frame of mind.

Two days later in a daily paper over no signature, appeared this little
paragraph: "We learn that 'The Shadow,' painted by Bianca Stone, who is
not generally known to be the wife of the writer, Mr. Hilary Dallison,
will soon be exhibited at the Bencox Gallery. This very 'fin-de-siecle'
creation, with its unpleasant subject, representing a woman (presumably
of the streets) standing beneath a gas-lamp, is a somewhat anaemic piece
of painting. If Mr. Dallison, who finds the type an interesting one,
embodies her in one of his very charming poems, we trust the result will
be less bloodless."

The little piece of green-white paper containing this information was
handed to Hilary by his wife at breakfast. The blood mounted slowly in
his cheeks. Bianca's eyes fastened themselves on that flush. Whether or
no--as philosophers say--little things are all big with the past, of
whose chain they are the latest links, they frequently produce what
apparently are great results.

The marital relations of Hilary and his wife, which till then had been
those of, at all events, formal conjugality, changed from that moment.
After ten o'clock at night their lives became as separate as though they
lived in different houses. And this change came about without
expostulations, reproach, or ex