rd of.' When I mentioned the guests
at the two last receptions I'd been to, if you will believe me, she had
never heard of a single name,--'all mushrooms,' she declared."

Her eyes, dancing roguishly, met mine over the tea-table, and a bright
blush instantly overspread her face, as if a rose-coloured search-light
had fallen on her.

The embarrassment which I always felt in her presence became suddenly as
acute as physical soreness, and the blush in her face served only to
illuminate her consciousness of my difference, of my roughness, of the
fact that externally, at least, I had never managed to shake myself free
from a resemblance to the market boy who had once brought his basket of
potatoes to the door of this very house. The "magnificent animal," I
knew, had never appealed to her except as it was represented in
horse-flesh; and yet the "magnificent animal" was what in her eyes I
must ever remain. I looked at George, leaning against a white column,
and his appearance of perfect self-sufficiency, his air of needing
nothing, changed my embarrassment into a smothered sensation of anger.
And as in the old days of my first great success, this anger brought
with it, through some curious association of impulses, a fierce, almost
a frenzied, desire for achievement. Here, in the little world of
tradition and sentiment, I might show still at a disadvantage, but
outside, in the open, I could respond freely to the lust for power, to
the passion for supremacy, which stirred my blood. Turning, with a
muttered excuse about letters to read, I went into the house, and closed
my study door behind me with a sense of returning to a friendly and
familiar atmosphere.

Through the rest of the year Sally devoted herself with energy to the
cultivation of flowers; but when the following spring opened, after a
hard winter, she seemed to have grown listless and indifferent, and when
I spoke of the garden, she merely shook her head and pointed to an
unworked border at the foot of the grey-wall.

"I can't make anything grow, Ben. All those brown sticks down there are
the only signs of the bulbs I set out last autumn with my own hands.
Nothing comes up as it ought to."

"Perhaps you need pipes like the doctor," I suggested.

"Oh, no, that would uproot the old shrubs, and besides, I am tired of
it, I think."

She was lying on the couch in her sitting-room, a pile of novels on a
table beside her, and the delicacy in her appearance, the transp