as quite near enough. "As
it is," she said, "I'm only afraid he'll be with you every moment with
his suggestions, and won't let you have any chance to work out your own
conceptions."

Godolphin had not failed to notify the public through the press that Mr.
Brice Maxwell had severed his connection with the Boston _Abstract_, for
the purpose of devoting himself to a new play for Mr. Launcelot
Godolphin, and he thought it would have been an effective touch if it
could have been truthfully reported that Mr. Godolphin and Mr. Maxwell
might be seen almost any day swinging over the roads together in the
neighborhood of Manchester, blind and deaf to all the passing, in their
discussion of the play, which they might almost be said to be
collaborating. But failing Maxwell's consent to anything of the sort,
Godolphin did the swinging over the roads himself, so far as the roads
lay between Manchester and Magnolia. He began by coming in the forenoon,
when he broke Maxwell up fearfully, but he was retarded by a waning of
his own ideal in the matter, and finally got to arriving at that hour in
the afternoon when Maxwell could be found revising his morning's work,
or lying at his wife's feet on the rocks, and now and then irrelevantly
bringing up a knotty point in the character or action for her criticism.
For these excursions Godolphin had equipped himself with a gray corduroy
sack and knickerbockers, and a stick which he cut from the alder
thicket; he wore russet shoes of ample tread, and very thick-ribbed
stockings, which became his stalwart calves.

Nothing could be handsomer than the whole effect he made in this
costume, and his honest face was a pleasure to look at, though its
intelligence was of a kind so wholly different from the intelligence of
Maxwell's face, that Mrs. Maxwell always had a struggle with herself
before she could allow that it was intelligence at all. He was very
polite to her; he always brought her flowers, and he opened doors, and
put down windows, and leaped to his feet for every imaginable occasion
of hers, in a way that Maxwell never did, and somehow a way that the
polite men of her world did not, either. She had to school herself to
believe him a gentleman, and she would not accept a certain vivid
cleanliness he had as at all aristocratic; she said it was too fresh,
and he ought to have carried a warning placard of "Paint." She found
that Godolphin had one great and constant merit: he believed in
Maxwel