d she dropped the subject, inwardly
pleased with him, and knowing that he was right.

His strength fascinated her, and she admired his manliness of heart and
feeling as she had never admired any qualities in any one during her
life. But he did not amuse her, even as much as she had been amused by
Reanda. He was melancholic, earnest, hard working, not inclined to
repeat lightly the words of love once spoken in moments of passion. He
meant, perhaps, to show her how he loved her by what he would do for her
sake, rather than tell her of it over and over again. And he worked as
he had never worked before, hour after hour, day after day, sitting at
his writing-table almost from morning till night. Besides his
correspondence, he was now writing a book, from which he hoped great
things--for her. It was a novel, and he read her day by day the pages he
wrote. She talked over with him what he had written, and her
imagination and dramatic intelligence, forever grasping at situations of
emotion for herself and others, suggested many variations upon his plan.

"It is my book," she often said, when they had been talking all the
evening.

It was her book, and it was a failure, because it was hers and not his.
Her imagination was disorderly, to borrow a foreign phrase, and she was
altogether without any sense of proportion in what she imagined. He did
not, indeed, look upon her as intellectually perfect, though for him she
was otherwise unapproachably superior to every other woman in the world.
But he loved her so wholly and unselfishly that he could not bear to
disappoint her by not making use of her suggestions. When she was
telling him of some scene she had imagined, her voice and manner, too,
were so thoroughly dramatic that he was persuaded of the real value of
the matter. Divested of her individuality and transferred in his rather
mechanically over-correct language to the black and white of pen and
ink, the result was disappointing, even when he read it to her. He knew
that it was, and wasted time in trying to improve what was bad from the
beginning. She saw that he failed, and she felt that he was not a man of
genius. Her vanity suffered because her ideas did not look well on his
paper.

Before he had finished the manuscript, she had lost her interest in it.
Feeling that she had, and seeing it in her face, he exerted his strength
of will in the attempt to bring back the expression of surprise and
delight which the earlier rea