now stands,
I do not see my part in it, and I can imagine why you should be
reluctant to make further changes in it, in order to meet my
requirements.

"If I can be of any service to you in placing the piece, I shall be glad
to have you make use of me.

"Yours truly,
"LAUNCELOT GODOLPHIN."

"You blame _me_!" she said, after a blinding moment, in which the letter
darkened before her eyes, and she tottered in her walk. She gave it back
to him as she spoke.

"What a passion you have for blaming!" he answered, coldly. "If I fixed
the blame on you it wouldn't help."

"No," Louise meekly assented, and they walked along towards their
cottage. They hardly spoke again before they reached it and went in.
Then she asked, "Did you expect anything like this from the way he
parted with you yesterday?"

Maxwell gave a bitter laugh. "From the way we parted yesterday I was
expecting him early this afternoon, with the world in the palm of his
hand, to lay it at my feet. He all but fell upon my neck when he left
me. I suppose his not actually doing it was an actor's intimation that
we were to see each other no more."

"I wish you had nothing to do with actors!" said Louise.

"_They_ appear to have nothing to do with me," said Maxwell. "It comes
to the same thing."

They reached the cottage, and sat down in the little parlor where she
had left him so hopefully at work in the morning, where they had talked
his play over so jubilantly the night before.

"What are you going to do?" she asked, after an abysmal interval.

"Nothing. What is there to do?"

"You have a right to an explanation; you ought to demand it."

"I don't need any explanation. The case is perfectly clear. Godolphin
doesn't want my play. That is all."

"Oh, Brice!" she lamented. "I am so dreadfully sorry, and I know it was
my fault. Why don't you let me write to him, and explain--"

Maxwell shook his head. "He doesn't want any explanation. He doesn't
want the play, even. We must make up our minds to that, and let him go.
Now we can try it with your managers."

Louise felt keenly the unkindness of his calling them her managers, but
she was glad to have him unkind to her; deep within her Unitarianism she
had the Puritan joy in suffering for a sin; her treatment of
Godolphin's suggestion of a skirt-dance, while very righteous in itself,
was a sin against her husband's interest, and she would rather he were
un