rd;
but he was sure that he would do not only what was right, but what was
noble, if he could be taken at the right moment. Upon the whole, he
liked him; in a curious sort, he respected and honored him; and he
defended him against Mrs. Maxwell when she said Godolphin was wearing
her husband's life out, and that if he made the play as greatly
successful as "Hamlet," or the "Trip to Chinatown," he would not be
worth what it cost them both in time and temper.

They lost a good deal of time and temper with the play, which was almost
a conjugal affair with them, and the struggle to keep up a show of gay
leisure before the summering world up and down the coast told upon Mrs.
Maxwell's nerves. She did not mind the people in the hotel so much; they
were very nice, but she did not know many of them, and she could not
care for them as she did for her friends who came up from Beverly Farms
and over from Manchester. She hated to call Maxwell from his work at
such times, not only because she pitied him, but because he came to help
her receive her friends with such an air of gloomy absence and open
reluctance; and she had hated still worse to say he was busy with his
play, the play he was writing for Mr. Godolphin. Her friends were
apparently unable to imagine anyone writing a play so seriously, and
they were unable to imagine Mr. Godolphin at all, for they had never
heard of him; the splendor of his unknown name took them more than
anything else. As for getting Maxwell to return their visits with her,
when men had come with the ladies who called upon her, she could only
manage it if he was so fagged with working at his play that he was too
weak to resist her will, and even then he had to be torn from it almost
by main force. He behaved so badly in the discharge of some of these
duties to society, and was, to her eye at least, so bored and worried by
them that she found it hard to forgive him, and made him suffer for it
on the way home till she relented at the sight of his thin face, the
face that she loved, that she had thought the world well lost for. After
the third or fourth time she made him go with her she gave it up and
went alone, though she was aware that it might look as if they were not
on good terms. She only obliged him after that to go with her to her
father's, where she would not allow any shadow of suspicion to fall upon
their happiness, and where his absent-mindedness would be accounted for.
Her mother seemed to unde