isburns" went up.

It was not till three years later that, in the course of a few weeks'
idling on the Riviera, it suddenly occurred to me to wonder why Gisburn
had given up his painting. On reflection, it really was a tempting
problem. To accuse his wife would have been too easy--his fair sitters
had been denied the solace of saying that Mrs. Gisburn had "dragged him
down." For Mrs. Gisburn--as such--had not existed till nearly a year
after Jack's resolve had been taken. It might be that he had married
her--since he liked his ease--because he didn't want to go on painting;
but it would have been hard to prove that he had given up his painting
because he had married her.

Of course, if she had not dragged him down, she had equally, as Miss
Croft contended, failed to "lift him up"--she had not led him back to
the easel. To put the brush into his hand again--what a vocation for
a wife! But Mrs. Gisburn appeared to have disdained it--and I felt it
might be interesting to find out why.

The desultory life of the Riviera lends itself to such purely academic
speculations; and having, on my way to Monte Carlo, caught a glimpse
of Jack's balustraded terraces between the pines, I had myself borne
thither the next day.

I found the couple at tea beneath their palm-trees; and Mrs. Gisburn's
welcome was so genial that, in the ensuing weeks, I claimed it
frequently. It was not that my hostess was "interesting": on that point
I could have given Miss Croft the fullest reassurance. It was just
because she was NOT interesting--if I may be pardoned the bull--that I
found her so. For Jack, all his life, had been surrounded by interesting
women: they had fostered his art, it had been reared in the hot-house
of their adulation. And it was therefore instructive to note what effect
the "deadening atmosphere of mediocrity" (I quote Miss Croft) was having
on him.

I have mentioned that Mrs. Gisburn was rich; and it was immediately
perceptible that her husband was extracting from this circumstance a
delicate but substantial satisfaction. It is, as a rule, the people who
scorn money who get most out of it; and Jack's elegant disdain of
his wife's big balance enabled him, with an appearance of perfect
good-breeding, to transmute it into objects of art and luxury. To the
latter, I must add, he remained relatively indifferent; but he was
buying Renaissance bronzes and eighteenth-century pictures with a
discrimination that bespoke the amplest r