"I guess daddy's too busy to play with Puck. The house hasn't got its roof on yet."
"Gregory! She's been looking forward to it so all week. Why, you're working!"
"What did you think I was doing?" Gregory looked up curiously; he so often felt as if she were the child and Puck the woman.
"I thought it was one of those water color things."
Gregory sometimes rested his eyes during these week-ends through the summer, sketching the woods and soft green fields. They were not bad sketches, but Margaret had no respect for them. Subconsciously she was jealous of them. They stood for something in Gregory that had escaped her. With more courage than any one gave her credit for, Margaret Allen had long ago buried her early belief in her husband's ability. She had been very sure when she married him, a year after his graduation from the Beaux Arts with honors, that he was going to be a rich and famous architect. Neither the fame nor the riches had come in spite of her early efforts to connect with people who could be of service. Nor later, when she had recognized the uselessness of trying to force Gregory along these paths, and turned her influence to taking a personal interest, which meant asking questions about technical details which she could not understand. The little water color sketches were like relics that Gregory had kept from the years before he knew her, and when he had gone back to the office on Monday mornings, and she came on a sketch among the scattered sheets of the Sunday paper, she felt almost as if it were the possession of some woman who had an illicit place in her husband's life.
Margaret bent over the plan.
"Greggy, did you get the Stevens house?"
Gregory watched her with a faint smile. She was very near, so that the same clean, sweet odor drifted to him as when he slipped his arm about Puck. The same little tendril, too slight to be a curl; brushed Margaret's neck just below her ear.
"But what on earth is that? Surely the Stevens aren't going to have a front like that?"
"Hardly. What's the good of making a fortune in five years if you don't write it all over the place?"