must
be subject to them, however he mastered them at last; he must flatter
their oddities and indulge their caprices. His experience with
Godolphin had taught him that, and his experience with Godolphin in the
construction of his play could be nothing to what he must undergo at
rehearsals and in the effort to adapt his work to a company. He reminded
himself that Shakespeare even must have undergone all that. But this did
not console him. He was himself, and what another, the greatest, had
suffered would not save him. Besides, it was not the drama merely that
Maxwell loved; it was not making plays alone; it was causing the life
that he had known to speak from the stage, and to teach there its
serious and important lesson. In the last analysis he was a moralist,
and more a moralist than he imagined. To enforce, in the vividest and
most palpable form, what he had thought true, it might be worth while to
endure all the trials that he must; but at that moment he did not think
so; and he did not dare submit his misgiving to his wife.

They had now been six months married, and if he had allowed himself to
face the fact he must have owned that, though they loved each other so
truly, and he had known moments of exquisite, of incredible rapture, he
had been as little happy as in any half-year he had lived. He never
formulated his wife's character, or defined the precise relation she
bore to his life; if he could have been challenged to do so, he would
have said that she was the whole of life to him, and that she was the
most delightful woman in the world.

He tasted to its last sweetness the love of loving her and of being
loved by her. At the same time there was an obscure stress upon him
which he did not trace to her at once; a trouble in his thoughts which,
if he could have seen it clearly, he would have recognized for a lurking
anxiety concerning how she would take the events of their life as they
came. Without realizing it, for his mind was mostly on his work, and it
was only in some dim recess of his spirit that the struggle took place,
he was perpetually striving to adjust himself to the unexpected, or
rather the unpredictable.

But when he was most afraid of her harassing uncertainty of emotion or
action he was aware of her fixed loyalty to him; and perhaps it was the
final effect with himself that he dreaded. Should he always be able to
bear and forbear, as he felt she would, with all her variableness and
turning? Th