should I come down to
Windlow, take possession, and having picked the sweetest flower in the
garden, stick it in my buttonhole and march away?"

Maud laughed and said, "Oh, no, it isn't that--it is quite a simple
matter. You have learnt a trade, a difficult trade; why should you give
it up? We don't happen to need the money, but that doesn't matter. My
business is to take off your shoulders, if I can, all the trouble
entailed on you by marrying me--it's simply a division of labour. You
can't just settle down in the country as a small squire, with nothing
much to do. People must do the work they can do, and I should be
miserable if I thought I had pulled you out of your place in the world."

"I don't know," said Howard; "there seems to me to be something rather
stuffy about it: why can't we just live? Women do; there is no fuss
made about their work, and their need to express themselves; yet they
do it even more than men, and they do it without priggishness. My work
at Cambridge is just what everyone else is doing, and if I don't do it,
there will be half a dozen men capable of doing it and glad to do it.
The great men of the world don't talk about the importance of their
work: they just do whatever comes to hand--it's only the second-rate
men who say that their talents haven't full scope. Do you remember poor
Chambers, who was at lunch the other day? He told me that he had
migrated from a town parish to a country parish, and that he missed the
organisation so much. 'There seems nothing to organise down in the
country!' he said. 'Now in my town parish there was the whole machine
to keep going--I enjoyed that, and I don't feel I am giving effect to
the best part of myself.' That seemed to me such a pompous line, and I
felt that I didn't want to be like that. One's work! how little it
matters! No one is indispensable--the disappearance of one man just
gives another his chance."

"Yes, of course, it is rather hard to draw the line," said Maud, "and I
think it is a pity to be solemn about it; but it seems to me so simple
in this case. You can do the work--they want you back--there is no
reason why you should not go back."

"Perhaps it is mere laziness," said Howard, "but I feel as if I wanted
a different sort of life now, a quieter life; and yet I know that there
is a snare about that. I rather mistrust the people who say they must
get time to think out things. It's like the old definition of
metaphysics--the science of