er
pictures with a little nervous laugh. "You must make allowances for
the artist woman, Honor. She so seldom feels and does the things she
ought to feel and do!"

"That's just why she is apt to be so refreshing!--But believe me,
Quita, the most perfect marriage is not quite perfect till it becomes
'the trio perfect,' three persons and one love. That's not fantastic
idealism but simple fact. Besides," she hesitated and caressed a stray
tendril of Quita's hair, "doesn't it seem to you a bigger thing, on the
whole, to make men and women to the best of one's power, than to make
books or pictures, even fine ones?"

"Yes, in some ways . . it does. And for that very reason I doubt
whether I am fitted to make them. It's a gift, an art, like everything
else. Not the creating of them, of course. That's a privilege, or a
fatality, as the case may be! But the moulding of them, after they are
created. You can't deny that they complicate things: and even at this
stage, I find marriage a far more complicated affair than I imagined it
to be. Didn't you?"

Honor's smile was sufficient evidence to the contrary. But she was
old-fashioned enough to have a difficulty in talking about the hidden
poem of her life.

"Perhaps we were exceptions, Theo and I," she said at last. "We knew
one another . . intimately, before starting; and to live with him,
and . . in him, seemed to come as natural as breathing. But then, my
dear, I'm simply a wife and a mother: not a woman of genius, like you."

"Aren't you, indeed? Don't pulverise me with sarcasms, please! In my
opinion this exquisite passion of yours for being 'simply a wife and a
mother' is in itself a kind of genius: perhaps the highest there is.
You see and feel the essential beauty of both relations so vividly that
you make one see and feel it also; just as certain other kinds of women
make one half-ashamed of being a woman at all! Yours is the
temperament that gives, Honor, . . gives royally; and is always sure of
return because it looks for none. While as for me, my present
complications are the natural outcome,--multiplied by six years,--of my
long-ago blindness and folly, that sprang from my capacity for taking,
without a thought of giving in return. You see, Eldred and I have both
an ample time to crystallise in different directions: and the years we
let slip may be trusted to exact their debt to the uttermost
farthing.--Ah, there he is!"

The words were a mere