father's
and mother's, and my mother's; and your house on Commonwealth Avenue,
and our meek mansion on Pinckney Street. He would make it a work of
art, Pinney would, and he would believe that we were all secretly
gratified with it, no matter how we pretended to writhe under it." He
laughed and laughed, and then suddenly he stopped and was very grave.

"I know what you're thinking of now," said his wife.

"What?"

"Whether you couldn't use _our_ affair in the play?"

"You're a witch! Yes, I was! I was thinking it wouldn't do."

"Stuff! It _will_ do, and you must use it. Who would ever know it? And I
shall not care how blackly you show me up. I deserve it. If I was the
cause of your hating love so much that you failed with your lovers on
the old lines, I certainly ought to be willing to be the means of your
succeeding on lines that had never been tried before."

"Generous girl!" He bent over--he had not to bend far--and kissed her.
Then he rose excitedly and began to walk the floor, with his hands in
his pockets, and his head dropped forward. He broke into speech: "I
could disguise it so that nobody would ever dream of it. I'll just take
a hint from ourselves. How would it do to have had the girl actually
reject him? It never came to that with us; and instead of his being a
howling outside swell that was rather condescending to her, suppose I
have him some sort of subordinate in her father's business? It doesn't
matter much what; it's easy to arrange such a detail. She could be in
love with him all the time, without even knowing it herself, or, at
least, not knowing it when he offers himself; and she could always be
vaguely hoping or expecting that he would come to time again."

"That's what I did," said his wife, "and you hadn't offered yourself
either."

Maxwell stopped, with an air of discomfiture and disappointment. "You
wouldn't like me to use that point, then?"

"What a simpleton! Of course I should! I shouldn't care if all the world
knew it."

"Ah, well, we won't give it to Pinney, anyway; but I really think it
could be done without involving our own facts. I should naturally work
farther and farther away from them when the thing got to spinning. Just
take a little color from them now and then. I might have him hating her
all the way through, or, supposing he hated her, and yet doing all sorts
of nice little things, and noble big things for her, till it came out
about her father's crime, and then--" He