ent," the doctor told me. "He must
have plenty of milk and eggs, and good red meat."

It sounded easy enough, but it wasn't. Rosalie couldn't grasp the fact
that diet in Perry's case was important. For the first time I saw a
queer sort of obstinacy in her.

"Oh, my poor Peer!" And she laughed lightly. "Do they want to make a
stuffed pig of you?"

Well, you simply couldn't get it into her head that Perry needed the
bread that she sold for hyacinths. She cooked steaks and chops for him,
and served them with an air of protest that took away his appetite.

Of course there remained the eggs and milk, but he didn't like them.
What Perry really needed was three good meals a day according to the
tradition of his mother's home.

But he couldn't have them. His mother was dead, and the home broken up.
The little bungalow, with its old brocades, its Venetian glass, its
Florentine carvings, its sun-dial and its garden, was the best that life
could offer him. And I must confess that he seemed to think it very
good. He adored Rosalie. When in moments of rebellion against her
seeming indifference I hinted that she lacked housewifely qualities he
smiled and shifted the subject abruptly.

Once he said, "She feeds--my soul."

Of course she loved him. But love to her meant what it had meant in
those first days on the Maine coast when she had seen him, slender and
strong, his brown hair blowing back from his sun-tanned skin; it meant
those first days in their new home when, handsome and debonair in the
velvet coat which she had made him wear, he had added a high light to
the picture she had made of her home.

This new Perry, pale and coughing--shivering in the warmth of the
fire--did not fit into the picture. Her dreams of the future had not
included a tired man who worked for his living, and who was dying for
lack of intelligent care.

To put it into cold words makes it sound ghoulish. But of course Rosalie
was not really that. She was merely absorbed in her own exalted theories
and she was not maternal. I think when I compared her, unthinking, to
the young moon, that I was subconsciously aware of her likeness to the
"orbed maiden" whose white fire warms no one.

She tried to do her best, and I am quite sure that Perry never knew the
truth--that he might have been saved if she could have left her heights
for a moment and had become womanly and wifely. If she had mothered him
a bit--poured out her tenderness upon him--oh, my poo