he did all he could to help her render it
attractive and homelike. If it was not yet all they wished, or all he
intended it should be, he knew that they were young, and felt that
they could wait; and he said as much to Lilian when he saw her stand
on tiptoe before a picture or look longingly at a bit of bronze;
conscious the while that there was an artistic and luxurious side to
the child's nature that he did not gratify--with which, indeed, he had
little sympathy--and evidence of which it often vexed him to observe,
as if it were a barrier between them, when her rapt face revealed
feelings unknown to him as she looked into the sunset; as she stood at
the door on summer nights while bell-notes and flower-scents went by
on the wind; as she listened to orchestral music which in his ears was
a noisy snarl. But, for all that, he said to himself that this ideal
intelligence, so to call it, of Lilian's, was something higher than
his own rude senses; he had no wish to place her on a lower level; he
must do away the barrier by surmounting it himself; and he used his
leisure time to study pictures and music, to discover the entrance to
this world of art whose atmosphere he fancied to be Lilian's native
air; and already he began to be able to translate into ideas the
strange and awful thrill he felt before some great white marble where
genius and inspiration had wrought together, and to find the thread by
which he might one day follow the vast windings of those symphonies
which Lilian always grew so pale to hear. But he was a person of
singular reserves, and Lilian learned nothing of such effort or
accomplishment as yet. "You think I am so perfect!" she would say.
"You have built up a great hollow idol around me, and it is like
living in a vacuum. Don't you know it is very tiresome to be chained
up to such a standard?" And John only adored her all the more for her
candor, did not believe it, and hastened home from business the
sooner.

In fact, if this home, in which they all shared, was not exactly as
they would have liked it to be, it was nevertheless a delightful place
to John Sterling. He already had a sense of proprietorship in it. He
lined its walls with books as he grew able, with prints, with now and
then a painting, with plaster till he could get marble; Lilian's ivies
clambered everywhere, and her azaleas and great lilies seemed to have
a secret of perpetual flowering; a bright fire cast rosy lights and
shadows over i