g
despondency about it.

"This thing can't go," he had said. "It's getting more lifeless from week
to week. We're draining all the blood out of it and this stuff we're
putting in is sawdust."

She whipped round upon him in a sudden tempest. "It's got to go," she
said. "It's got to be made to go. If what you're putting into it is
sawdust, take it out. Put some heart into it."

He had been staring gloomily at the score. Now he turned away from it.
"That's what I don't seem able to do," he said.

She came up and took him by the shoulders so violently that it might
almost be said she shook him. "You can't let go like that. It's too late.
Everything I've got in the world is mixed up in it." She must have read
his unspoken thought there for she went on, "Oh, I suppose you'd say I'd
still have John if I did fail. Well, I wouldn't. He's mixed up in it,
too. He'd never forgive me if I failed. It's the fear I'll fail and make
myself look cheap and ridiculous that makes him hate it so. Well, I'm not
going to. Make up your mind to that!"

Later, when he was leaving, under a promise to improve some of the
passages they had been arguing about, she reverted to this aspect of the
matter and added something. "John can see what a failure would mean. But
what the other thing--the big real success--would mean to both of us, he
hasn't the faintest idea of. He won't till I get it."

"He's a famous person, himself, of course," March observed, not without a
gleam of mischief.

She echoed the word quite blankly, and he went on to amplify.

"That European Medical Commission that was out here a few weeks ago
attended some of his clinics in a body. I don't suppose there's a
first-class hospital anywhere in this country or in Europe where his name
isn't known. That operation he did on Sarah turned out to be a classic,
you know. He used a new technique in it which has become standard since."

But it seemed to him that she still looked incredulous when he went away,
incapable of really digesting that idea at all. No, he wouldn't have bet
much on the chance that any great success of hers could reunite them. The
love life that they had been enjoying this last five years hadn't thrown
out any radicles to bind them together--children for instance.

March wondered why there had been no children. He was not inclined to
accept the obvious explanation that she hadn't wanted any. She had spoken
once of her childlessness in a tone that didn't quite