"I work with my hands.
They do not. There is the difference."

"But you are the greatest artist in the world!" she cried
enthusiastically, throwing her arms round his neck, and kissing him
again and again. "It is ridiculous. In any other city, in London, in
Paris, people would run after you, people would not be able to do
enough for you. But it is not you; it is I. They do not like me, Angelo,
I know that they do not like me! They want me at their big parties, and
they want me to sing for them--but that is all. Not one of them wants me
for a friend. I am so lonely, Angelo."

Her eyes filled with tears, and he tried to comfort her.

"What does it matter, my heart?" he asked, soothingly. "We have each
other, have we not? I, who adore you, and you, who love me--"

"Love you? I worship you! That is why I wish you to have everything the
world holds, everything at your feet."

"But I am quite satisfied," objected Reanda, with unwise truth. "Do not
think of me."

She loved him, but she wished to put upon him some of her uncontrollable
longing for social success, in order to justify herself. To please her,
he should have joined in her complaint. Her tears dried suddenly, and
her eyes flashed.

"I will think of you!" she cried. "I have nothing else to think of. You
shall have it all, everything--they shall know what a man you are!"

"An artist, my dear, an artist. A little better than some, a little less
good than others. What can society do for me?"

She sighed, and the colour deepened a little in her cheeks. But she hid
her annoyance, for she loved him with a love at once passionate and
intentional, compounded of reality and of a strong inborn desire for
emotion, a desire closely connected with her longing for the life of the
stage, but now suddenly thrown with full force into the channel of her
actual life.

Reanda began to understand that his wife was not happy, and the
certainty reacted strongly upon him. He became more sad and abstracted
from day to day, when he was not with her. He longed, as only a man of
such a nature can long, for a friend in whom he could confide, and of
whom he could ask advice. He had such a friend, indeed, in Francesca
Campodonico, but he was too proud to turn to her, and too deeply
conscious that she had done all she could to give Gloria the social
position the latter coveted.

Francesca, on her side, was not slow to notice that something was
radically wrong. Reanda's manner had chan