onfidence. Decidedly not,
if you had been to me the wife an artist needs. My future has lain in
your power to make or mar. You have chosen to keep me in perpetual
anxiety, and now you take a suitable opportunity to overthrow me
altogether; or rather, you try to. We will see how things go when I am
free to pursue my course untroubled."

"Do so, by all manner of means!" exclaimed Madeline, her voice
trembling. "Perhaps I shall prove to have been your friend in this way,
at all events. As your wife in London lodgings on the third floor, I
confess it is very unlikely I should have aided you. I haven't the
least belief in projects of that kind. At best, you would have been
forced into some kind of paltry work just to support me--and where
would be the good of our marriage? You know perfectly well that lots of
men have been degraded in this way. They take a wife to be their Muse,
and she becomes the millstone about their neck; then they hate her--and
I don't blame them. What's the good of saying one moment that you know
your work can never appeal to the multitude, and the next, affecting to
believe that our marriage would make you miraculously successful?"

"Then it would have been better to part before this."

"No doubt--as it turns out."

"Why do you speak bitterly? I am stating an obvious fact."

"If I remember rightly, you had some sort of idea that the fact of our
engagement might help you. That didn't seem to me impossible. It is a
very different thing from marriage on nothing a year."

"You have no faith in me; you never had. And how _could_ you believe in
what you don't understand? I see now what I have been forced to
suspect--that your character is just as practical as that of other
women. Your talk of art is nothing more than talk. You think, in truth,
of pounds, shillings and pence."

"I think of them a good deal," said Madeline, "and I should be an idiot
if I didn't. What is art if the artist has nothing to live on? Pray,
what are _you_ going to do henceforth? Shall you scorn the mention of
pounds, shillings and pence? Come to see me when you have had no dinner
to-day, and are feeling very uncertain about breakfast in the morning,
and I will say, 'Pooh! your talk about art was after all nothing but
talk; you are a sham!'"

Marsh's leg began to ache. He rose and moved about the room. Madeline
at length turned her eyes to him; he was brooding genuinely, and not
for effect. Her glance discerned this.

"Wel