The Story of a Play | Page 8

comes out with those things."
"I can't help it, dearest. They are insulting to you, and insulting to
common-sense. It's a kindness to let him know how they would strike
the public. I don't pretend to be more than the average public."
"He doesn't feel it a kindness the way you put it."
"Then you don't like me to be sincere with him! Perhaps you don't like
me to be sincere with you about your play?"
"Be as sincere with me as you like. But this--this is a matter of business,
and I'd rather you wouldn't."
"Rather I wouldn't say anything at all?" demanded Louise.
"I didn't say so, and you know I didn't; but if you can't get on without
ruffling Godolphin, why, perhaps--"

"Very well, then, I'll leave the room the next time he comes. That will
be perfectly simple; and it will be perfectly simple to do as most other
people would--not concern myself with the play in any way from this
out. I dare say you would prefer that, too, though I didn't quite expect it
to come to that before our honeymoon was out."
"Oh, now, my dear!"
"You know it's so. But I can do it! I might have expected it from a man
who was so perfectly self-centred and absorbed. But I was such a
fool--" Her tears came and her words stopped.
Maxwell leaned forward with his thin face between his hands. This
made him miserable, personally, but he was not so miserable but his
artistic consciousness could take note of the situation as a very good
one, and one that might be used effectively on the stage. He analyzed it
perfectly in that unhappy moment. She was jealous of his work, which
she had tolerated only while she could share it, and if she could not
share it, while some other was suffered to do so, it would be cruel for
her. But he knew that he could not offer any open concession now
without making bad worse, and he must wait till the right time for it
came. He had so far divined her, without formulating her, that he knew
she would be humiliated by anything immediate or explicit, but would
later accept a tacit repentance from him; and he instinctively forebore.

III.
For the present in her resentment of his willingness to abase his genius
before Godolphin, or even to hold it in abeyance, Mrs. Maxwell would
not walk to supper with her husband in the usual way, touching his
shoulder with hers from time to time, and making herself seem a little
lower in stature by taking the downward slope of the path leading from
their cottage to the hotel. But the necessity of appearing before the
people at their table on as perfect terms with him as ever had the effect
that conduct often has on feeling, and she took his arm in going back to
their cottage, and leaned tenderly upon him.

Their cottage was one of the farthest from the hotel, and the smallest
and quietest. In fact there was yet no one in it but themselves, and they
dwelt there in an image of home, with the sole use of the veranda and
the parlor, where Maxwell had his manuscripts spread about on the
table as if he owned the place. A chambermaid came over from the
hotel in the morning to put the cottage in order, and then they could be
quite alone there for the rest of the day.
"Shall I light the lamp for you, Brice?" his wife asked, as they mounted
the veranda steps.
"No," he said, "let us sit out here," and they took the arm-chairs that
stood on the porch, and swung to and fro in silence for a little while.
The sea came and went among the rocks below, marking its course in
the deepening twilight with a white rope of foam, and raving huskily to
itself, with now and then the long plunge of some heavier surge against
the bowlders, and a hoarse shout. The Portland boat swam by in the
offing, a glitter of irregular lights, and the lamps on the different points
of the Cape blinked as they revolved in their towers. "This is the kind
of thing you can get only in a novel," said Maxwell, musingly. "You
couldn't possibly give the feeling of it in a play."
"Couldn't you give the feeling of the people looking at it?" suggested
his wife, and she put out her hand to lay it on his.
"Yes, you could do that," he assented, with pleasure in her notion; "and
that would be better. I suppose that is what would be aimed at in a
description of the scene, which would be tiresome if it didn't give the