as the
cerebral treachery that defied his own vigilance? There was some obscure
interference of taste, some obsession of the exquisite. All one could
say was that genius was a fatal disturber or that the unhappy man had
no effectual _flair_. When he went abroad to gather garlic he came home
with heliotrope.

I hasten to add that if Mrs. Limbert was not directly illuminating
she was yet rich in anecdote and example, having found a refuge from
mystification exactly where the rest of us had found it, in a more
devoted embrace and the sense of a finer glory. Her disappointments and
eventually her privations had been many, her discipline severe; but she
had ended by accepting the long grind of life and was now quite willing
to take her turn at the mill. She was essentially one of us--she
always understood. Touching and admirable at the last, when through the
unmistakable change in Limbert's health her troubles were thickest, was
the spectacle of the particular pride that she wouldn't have exchanged
for prosperity. She had said to me once--only once, in a gloomy hour in
London days when things were not going at all--that one really had to
think him a very great man because if one didn't one would be rather
ashamed of him. She had distinctly felt it at first--and in a very
tender place--that almost every one passed him on the road; but I
believe that in these final years she would almost have been ashamed of
him if he had suddenly gone into editions. It is certain indeed that her
complacency was not subjected to that shock. She would have liked the
money immensely, but she would have missed something she had taught
herself to regard as rather rare. There is another remark I remember her
making, a remark to the effect that of course if she could have chosen
she would have liked him to be Shakespeare or Scott, but that failing
this she was very glad he wasn't--well, she named the two gentlemen, but
I won't. I daresay she sometimes laughed out to escape an alternative.
She contributed passionately to the capture of the second manner,
foraging for him further afield than he could conveniently go, gleaning
in the barest stubble, picking up shreds to build the nest and in
particular in the study of the great secret of how, as we always said,
they all did it laying waste the circulating libraries. If Limbert had
a weakness he rather broke down in his reading. It was fortunately not
till after the appearance of _The Hidden Heart_ that