remonstrance, which she allowed to remain unspoken,
because she loved him. It was easy to say that there was no necessity to
prick her with a spur. But there were the tradesmen's bills unpaid, the
rent in arrear, and the children wanted things--not to speak of herself
and of him. And there was a drawer full of his unaccepted manuscripts.
They went hither and thither, from editor to editor, and then for the
most part they seemed to settle in the drawer.

She understood well enough what he meant when he asked if she thought
that she had in herself the making of a woman of letters. She had been a
nothing and a nobody. She had not even been very pretty. Certainly no
superfluity of money had been thrown away upon her education. It was not
at all as it is in the story books, but, quite by chance, he met her.
Before he knew it, he was wooing her. And, when things came to the worst
at home, he married her--she having nothing which she could call her own
except the things which she was wearing. And he had very little more. It
was not strange that he should doubt if in her there was the making of a
woman of letters--she, who, save in the way of love letters, had
scarcely ever written a line.

Geoffrey Ford was a genius. He had given her to understand that from the
very first--in the days when, in her ignorance, she scarcely understood
what a genius was. He gave her to understand it still, almost every day.
With him, to write was to live. To be a great writer was the dream of
his life. He strove to realise his dream with that dogged pertinacity
which is only to be seen in the case of a master passion. When they
first were married, he was struggling to be a dramatist. He was quite
conscious that, in the trade of the writer, wealth was only to be
achieved by the successful playwright. He believed that his was
essentially the playwright's instinct. Although his plays met with
abundance of good words, they did not attain production. It seemed as if
they never would. When they began to be actually starving, she
suggested that he should put aside playwriting for a time, and try to
earn money by other products of his pen. He had acted on her suggestion.
He had become that curiosity of modern civilisation--a writer for the
magazines. And, in a way, he had been successful. He was earning,
perhaps, an irregular hundred and fifty pounds a year. But what are an
irregular, a very irregular, hundred and fifty pounds a year, when there
are thre