he truth
about you is? But I know this sort of thing doesn't interest you," he
added hastily, with a touch of peevishness.

"No; it doesn't interest me very much," she replied candidly.

"What shall we talk about then?" he asked.

She looked rather whimsically round the walls of the room.

"However we start, we end by talking about the same thing--about poetry,
I mean. I wonder if you realize, William, that I've never read even
Shakespeare? It's rather wonderful how I've kept it up all these years."

"You've kept it up for ten years very beautifully, as far as I'm
concerned," he said.

"Ten years? So long as that?"

"And I don't think it's always bored you," he added.

She looked into the fire silently. She could not deny that the surface
of her feeling was absolutely unruffled by anything in William's
character; on the contrary, she felt certain that she could deal with
whatever turned up. He gave her peace, in which she could think of
things that were far removed from what they talked about. Even now,
when he sat within a yard of her, how easily her mind ranged hither and
thither! Suddenly a picture presented itself before her, without any
effort on her part as pictures will, of herself in these very rooms; she
had come in from a lecture, and she held a pile of books in her hand,
scientific books, and books about mathematics and astronomy which
she had mastered. She put them down on the table over there. It was a
picture plucked from her life two or three years hence, when she was
married to William; but here she checked herself abruptly.

She could not entirely forget William's presence, because, in spite of
his efforts to control himself, his nervousness was apparent. On such
occasions his eyes protruded more than ever, and his face had more than
ever the appearance of being covered with a thin crackling skin, through
which every flush of his volatile blood showed itself instantly. By this
time he had shaped so many sentences and rejected them, felt so many
impulses and subdued them, that he was a uniform scarlet.

"You may say you don't read books," he remarked, "but, all the same, you
know about them. Besides, who wants you to be learned? Leave that to the
poor devils who've got nothing better to do. You--you--ahem!--"

"Well, then, why don't you read me something before I go?" said
Katharine, looking at her watch.

"Katharine, you've only just come! Let me see now, what have I got to
show you?" He r