lines deepened between her brows.

It was her first serious attempt at a picture after four months of
idleness, and 'amateur scribblings'--so she designated them in her
letters to Michael; and for the time being brain and hand seemed to
have lost their cunning. She needed the stimulant of criticism, of
discussion, to oil the wheels and set the machine going afresh. If
only Michael were here, how they would have argued and squabbled, to
their souls' content, over values, and proportions and effects of light
and shade; and what a fine day's work would have sprung from it all!

"I really think I must get him down here for a week or two," she
thought. "Just to give me a fillip in the right direction."

Fired by the notion, she made one or two ineffectual dabs at the
woman's draperies: then, flinging down brush and palette, sank into a
deep, cushioned chair sacred to her husband, as a small table bearing
ash-tray, pipes, and a pile of corrected proofs, bore witness. She
glanced through them lazily, with softened eyes: then, as if drawn by a
magnet, her gaze returned to the picture.

"Horrid depressing thing!" the reflected. "And yet . . how attractive!
The general character of it is rather like Eldred himself. I suppose I
could produce nothing that wasn't at this stage! They are both up-hill
subjects, certainly; worth tackling; and not to be mastered in a day."

But for all that she was little used to wrestling with her art. The
touch of genius in her was of the spontaneous, rather than of the
painstaking order; and a remembered word of Michael's rose up to
disconcert her. "Succumb to your womanhood and there is an end of your
Art." Irritating man! What business had he to make random shots so
near to the truth. Yet it was not the whole truth; and hers was the
chance to prove it.

Certainly for the past six months and more, she had succumbed
unreservedly to her womanhood; had endured without a pang the temporary
eclipse of her art. What need to strive after the presentation, the
expression of life, when she had penetrated to the core of it: was
living it buoyantly, fervently, with every faculty of heart and spirit?
By nature a being of extremes, she was apt to fling all her energies in
one direction at a time: and in these last months of so-called idleness
she had been mastering the rudiments of the finest and most complex of
all arts,--the art of living in closest human relationship with 'a
creature of eq