ry man. If you've known what it is to hate, you've
known what it is to kill."

"I felt once as if I had killed _you_," she said, and then he knew that
she was thinking of a phase of their love which had a perpetual
fascination for them both. "But I never hated you."

"No; I did the hating," he returned, lightly.

"Ah, don't say so, dear," she entreated, half in earnest.

"Well, have it all to yourself, then," he said; and he rose and went
indoors, and lighted the lamp, and she saw him get out the manuscript of
his play, while she sat still, recalling the time when she had tried to
dismiss him from her thoughts upon a theory of his unworthiness. He had
not yet spoken of love to her then, but she felt as if she had refused
to listen to him, and her remorse kept his image before her in an
attitude of pathetic entreaty for at least a hearing. She knew that she
had given him reason, if she had not given him courage, to believe that
she cared for him; but he was too proud to renew the tacit approaches
from which she had so abruptly retreated, and she had to invite them
from him.

When she began to do this with the arts so imperceptible to the
single-mindedness of a man, she was not yet sure whether she could
endure to live with him or not; she was merely sure that she could not
live without him, or, to be more specific, without his genius, which she
believed no one else appreciated as she did. She believed that she
understood his character better than any one else, and would know how to
supplement it with her own. She had no ambition herself, but she could
lend him a more telescopic vision in his, and keep his aims high, if his
self-concentration ever made him short-sighted. He would write plays
because he could not help it, but she would inspire him to write them
with the lofty sense of duty she would have felt in writing them if she
had his gifts.

She was as happy in their engagement and as unhappy as girls usually are
during their courtship. It is the convention to regard those days as
very joyous, but probably no woman who was honest about the fact would
say that they were so from her own experience. Louise found them full of
excitement and an interest from which she relaxed at times with such a
sense of having strained forward to their end that she had a cold
reluctance from Maxwell, and though she never dreamed of giving him up
again, she sometimes wished she had never seen him. She was eager to
have it all over