tried it usually end by owning that love in comfort would be
no less charming.

So it was with Hubert.

Nobody, he told himself, could be a better little housekeeper than
Helena, no little home more fresh and dainty than their own: but though
she never worried him, cleverly adapting their ways to a variable
income, he was always faced by the uncomfortable thought: "If this book
fails--" or "unless I write some short stories--" and after a while
these things begin to tell. Within two years from marriage they had
told upon Hubert Brett.

And so had come into being that pot-boiler, confessed to Helena with
such solemnity on the wide, prudent, spaces of the Heath.

At first he had thought that it would be a hardship to exchange his own
realistic method, his studies of character, for those banalities of
plot and action independent of all motive, which wearied him even when
read, boiled down, in a magazine. But slowly his mood of cynical
disdain changed to a real enjoyment, for any task is splendid so soon
as a man gets at firm grips with it. He began to see that when once
you had got rid of the idea that action must proceed from character,
there was a certain joy in letting wild event pile up on wild event and
then be rapidly forgotten under even wilder. When once you had
abandoned all reserve, there was a fierce delight in splashing pages
with unfettered sentiment; making frank puppets think, love, and
renounce as they had thought, loved, and renounced since the old fruity
days of the three-volume novel. Of course it was all footle,
balderdash, but still (he told himself with pride) it was good footle,
splendid balderdash. He had bought some of the most "popular" of
recent novels in six-penny editions, novels that had brought fortunes
to their authors, and by comparison with his, they did the same thing
in a bungling manner. No able novelist, he cynically told his wife,
had ever tried till now to write a really good bad novel!

Helena loathed the whole enterprise, not only because she vaguely felt
that it was marriage with her which had made it needful, but because
she thought it so unworthy. And not least unworthy, not least
loathsome, did she find his way of talking. It had been so splendid to
hear him speak about his work in the old days: and now it was so
horrible.

"I've found a title at last," he said, emerging at lunch-time one day
when the book was in its revision-stage, and coming to her in the
dra