ch ungovernable and mysterious
spontaneities of sound. It was sometimes, they said, as if the villa were
alive. And when all the wood-work shrank, and the winter winds streamed
through their sitting-room, Aggie said nothing but put sand-bags in the
window and covered them with art serge.

Her mother declared that she had never stayed in a more inconvenient
house; but Aggie wouldn't hear a word against it. It was the house that
Arthur had chosen. She was sorry, she said, if her mother didn't like it.
Mrs. Purcell was sorry, too, because she could not honestly say that, in
the circumstances, she enjoyed a visit to Aggie and her husband. They made
her quite uncomfortable, the pair of them. Their ceaseless activities and
enthusiasms bewildered her. She didn't care a rap about the lectures, and
thought they were mad to go traipsing all the way to Hampstead to harangue
about things they could have discussed just as well--now, couldn't
they?--at home. Aggie, she said, would become completely undomesticated.
Mrs. Purcell was never pressed to stay longer than a week. They had no
further need of her, those two sublime young egoists, fused by their
fervors into one egoist, sublimer still. Mrs. Purcell was a sad hinderance
to the intellectual life, and they were glad when she was gone.

Heavens, how they kept it up! All through the winter evenings, when they
were not going to lectures, they were reading Browning aloud to each
other. For pure love of it, for its own sake, they said. But did Aggie
tire on that high way, she kept it up for Arthur's sake; did Arthur flag,
he kept it up for hers.

Then, in the spring, there came a time when Aggie couldn't go to lectures
any more. Arthur went, and brought her back the gist of them, lest she
should feel herself utterly cut off. The intellectual life had, even for
him, become something of a struggle. But, tired as he sometimes was, she
made him go, sending, as it were, her knight into the battle.

"Because now," she said, "we shall have to keep it up more than ever. For
_them_, you know."

V

"'I saw a ship a-sailing, a-sailing on the sea,
And it was full of pretty things for Baby and for me.'"

Aggie always sang that song the same way. When she sang "for Baby" she
gave the baby a little squeeze that made him laugh; when she sang "for me"
she gave Arthur a little look that made him smile.

"'There were raisins in the cabin, sugared kisses in the hold.'"

Here the