from his pen in high
moments. These, when the mood changed, he read again, and found dead,
and usually destroyed. He was more easily discouraged than a child who
sets out to tell its parent a story, and is all silence and shamefaced
blushes at the first whisper of laughter or semblance of a smile. The
works of poets dazed him, disheartened him, and secret ambitions toward
performance grew dimmer with every book he laid his hands on. Ambition
to create began to die; the dream scenery of his ill-controlled mental
life more and more seldom took shape of words on paper; and there came a
time when thought grew wholly wordless for him; a mere personal
pleasure, selfish, useless, unsubstantial as the glimmer of mirage over
desert sands.

Into this futile life came Chris, like a breath of sweet air from off
the deep sea. She lifted him clean out of his subjective existence,
awoke a healthy, natural love, built on the ordinary emotions of
humanity, galvanised self-respect and ambition into some activity, and
presently inspired a pluck strong enough to propose marriage. That was
two years ago; and the girl still loved this weakly soul with all her
heart, found his language unlike that of any other man she had seen or
heard, and even took some slight softening edge of culture into herself
from him. Her common sense was absolutely powerless to probe even the
crust of Clement's nature; but she was satisfied that his poetry must be
a thing as marketable as that in printed books. Indeed, in an elated
moment he had assured her that it was so. During the earlier stages of
their attachment, she pestered him to write and sell his verses and make
money, that their happiness might be hastened; while he, on the first
budding of his love, and with the splendid assurance of its return, had
promised all manner of things, and indeed undertaken to make poems that
should be sent by post to the far-away place where they printed unknown
poets, and paid them. Chris believed in Clement as a matter of course.
His honey must at least be worth more to the world than that of his
bees. Over her future husband she began at once to exercise the control
of mistress and mother; and she loved him more dearly after they had
been engaged a year than at the beginning of the contract. By that time
she knew his disposition, and instead of displaying frantic impatience
at it, as might have been predicted, her tolerance was extreme. She bore
with Clem because she love