getting on, and inquiries into this, or that.
She let him go his own way, without making so much as even one
suggestion. She was wont to be a little too free with her suggestions,
he sometimes fancied. For her suggestions hampered him. And--but this he
did not notice--she went her own way too. Rather an odd way it seemed to
be. For one thing, she seemed to be unusually busy. She did not come
into the room in which he was working even after the children had gone
to bed. She seemed to have something on her mind. She became distinctly
paler. It might have been illness, or it might have been anxiety, or it
might have been overwork. A queer look came into her eyes. Sometimes it
was almost like a look of apprehension. Then there would come a timidity
in all her movements, as if she were even afraid of him. Then it would
be like a look of vacancy, as if her thoughts were far away. When that
vacant look was there, she seemed to be unconscious of her husband's
presence--just as he had a trick, in his meditative moods, when he was
thinking of his work, of becoming unconscious of her. Then again, as one
looked into her eyes, one would have thought that she was possessed by
some mastering excitement--a flaming fire which glowed within.

One afternoon her husband came in from his daily visit to the Library
Reading Room. He was not in his happiest mood. He was a man of moods.
When the black mood was upon him, all the world was black.

"On my word, I do not know what things are coming to. There's Graham, of
_The Leviathan_, sends back everything I send him. That MS. which came
back this morning, he has had two months, and it's a first-rate thing.
Then he goes and fills his pages with stuff which I wouldn't put my name
to. The new number's out, and there's another story in it by that man
Philip Ayre. I never read such rubbish in my life."

His wife had looked up at him, as he came in, with a smile of welcome.
When he began to speak of _The Leviathan_, her face dropped again. It
went paler than even it was wont to do. There was a tremor in her voice.

"I thought you said that that other story of his was rather good."

"It was good enough--of its kind. But it's a kind I hate. There's a
craze about for sickly pathos, which, to me, is simply disgusting. In
that man Ayre there's the making of a popular writer. Mark my words, and
see if he doesn't make a hit. In a few months he will be all the
rage--you see. And it is to make room for suc