is was still recent in point of time, and though marriage had
remanded it to an infinite distance apparently with the young people, it
had not yet taken away the importance or the charm of the facts and the
feelings that had seemed the whole of life before marriage. When Louise
turned from her retrospect she went in through the window that opened on
the veranda and stood beside her husband, where he sat with his
manuscript before him, frowning at it in the lamplight that made her
blink a little after the dark outside. She put her hand on his head, and
carried it down his cheek over his mouth, so that he might kiss its
palm.

"Going to work much longer, little man?" she asked, and she kissed the
top of his head in her turn. It always amused her to find how smooth and
soft his hair was. He flung his pen away and threw himself back in his
chair. "Oh, it's that infernal love business!" he said.

She sat down and let her hands fall on her lap. "Why, what makes it so
hard?"

"Oh, I don't know. But it seems as if I were _fighting_ it, as the
actors say, all the way. It doesn't go of itself at all. It's forced,
from the beginning."

"Why do you have it in, then?"

"I have to have it in. It has to be in every picture of life, as it has
to be in every life. Godolphin is perfectly right. I talked with him
about leaving it out to-day, but I had to acknowledge that it wouldn't
do. In fact, I was the first to suggest that there must be some sort of
love business when I first talked the play over with him. But I wish
there hadn't. It makes me sick every time I touch it. The confounded
fools don't know what to do with their love."

"They might get married with it," Louise suggested.

"I don't believe they have sense enough to think of that," said her
husband. "The curse of their origin is on them, I suppose. I tried to
imagine them when I was only fit to imagine a man hating a woman with
all his might."

Louise laughed out her secure delight. "If the public could only know
why your lovers were such feeble folk it would make the fortune of the
play."

Maxwell laughed, too. "Yes, fancy Pinney getting hold of a fact like
that and working it up with all his native delicacy in the Sunday
edition of the _Events_!"

Pinney was a reporter of Maxwell's acquaintance, who stood to Louise for
all that was most terrible in journalistic enterprise. "Don't!" she
shrieked.

Maxwell went on. "He would have both our portraits in, and your