e question did not put itself in words, and neither did his
conviction that his relation to the theatre was doubled in difficulty
through her. But he perceived that she had no love for the drama, and
only a love for his love of it; and sometimes he vaguely suspected that
if he had been in business she would have been as fond of business as
she was of the drama. He never perhaps comprehended her ideal, and how
it could include an explicit and somewhat noisy devotion to the aims of
his ambition, because it was his, and a patronizing reservation in
regard to the ambition itself. But this was quite possible with Louise,
just as it was possible for her to have had a humble personal joy in
giving herself to him, while she had a distinct social sense of the
sacrifice she had made in marrying him. In herself she looked up to him;
as her father's and mother's daughter, as the child of her circumstance,
there is no doubt she looked down upon him. But neither of these
attitudes held in their common life. Love may or may not level ranks,
but marriage unquestionably does, and is the one form of absolute
equality. The Maxwells did not take themselves or each other
objectively; they loved and hated, they made war and made peace, without
any sense of the difference or desert that might have been apparent to
the spectators.

Maxwell had never been so near the standpoint of the impartial observer
as now when he confronted the question of what he should do, with a
heart twice burdened by the question whether his wife would not make it
hard for him to do it, whatever it was. He thought, with dark
foreboding, of the difficulties he should have to smooth out for her if
it ever came to a production of the piece. The best thing that could
happen, perhaps, would be its rejection, final and total, by all
possible managers and actors; for she would detest any one who took the
part of Salome, and would hold him responsible for all she should suffer
from it.

He recurred to what he had felt so strongly himself, and what Grayson
had suggested, and thought how he could free himself from fealty to her
by cutting out the whole love-business from his play. But that would be
very hard. The thing had now knitted itself in one texture in his mind,
and though he could sever the ties that bound the parts together, it
would take from the piece the great element of charm. It was not
symmetrical as it stood, but it was not two distinct motives; the
motives ha