d a 'den' on the ground floor of the left
wing; and there, in the mornings, he used to write a great deal. Mary
had no special place of her own: her place was wherever her duties
needed her. William wrote reviews of books for the Daily --. He did
also creative work. The vein of poetry in him had worked itself out--or
rather, it expressed itself for him in Mary. For technical purposes,
the influence of Ibsen had superseded that of Morris. At the time of
my first visit, he was writing an extraordinarily gloomy play about an
extraordinarily unhappy marriage. In subsequent seasons (Ibsen's disc
having been somehow eclipsed for him by George Gissing's) he was usually
writing novels in which every one--or do I exaggerate?--had made a
disastrous match. I think Mary's belief in his genius had made him less
diffident than he was at Oxford. He was always emerging from his den,
with fresh pages of MS., into the Room. 'You don't mind?' he would say,
waving his pages, and then would shout 'Mary!' She was always promptly
forthcoming--sometimes from the direction of the kitchen, in a white
apron, sometimes from the garden, in a blue one. She never looked at him
while he read. To do so would have been lacking in respect for his work.
It was on this that she must concentrate her whole mind, privileged
auditor that she was. She sat looking straight before her, with her lips
slightly compressed, and her hands folded on her lap. I used to wonder
that there had been that first moment when I did not think her pretty.
Her eyes were of a very light hazel, seeming all the lighter because her
hair was of so dark a brown; and they were beautifully set in a face
of that 'pinched oval' kind which is rather rare in England. Mary as
listener would have atoned to me for any defects there may have been in
dear old William's work. Nevertheless, I sometimes wished this work had
some comic relief in it. Publishers, I believe, shared this wish; hence
the eternal absence of William's name from among their announcements.
For Mary's sake, and his, I should have liked him to be 'successful.'
But at any rate he didn't need money. He didn't need, in addition to
what he had, what he made by his journalism. And as for success--well,
didn't Mary think him a genius? And wasn't he Mary's husband? The main
reason why I wished for light passages in what he read to us was that
they would have been cues for Mary's laugh. This was a thing always
new to me. I never tired of