"Not when he was there?" queried Dr. Ashton, holding up his graceful, antique wine-glass and admiring it.
"No, not when he was there," repeated his wife. "She had pounded off the head when he sent for me with a mallet she had picked up in his studio. I never saw him in such a rage. She was gone when I got there. She didn't make any attempt to conceal it. She came stalking melodramatically into his studio with the mallet and laid it down. 'There,' said she, 'now kill me. I have broken her work.' It was like a fashion magazine story. He thought at first she had gone mad."
"So she had. Women are always insane when they are jealous. I wish I had Arthur's knack at epigram, and I'd make that sound original."
"He says he was very harsh," Helen continued, "though I fancy he could not be quite that in any circumstances. It was very hard," she added with a sigh. "It was like looking at a dead child to see my best work ruined. It was really a part of myself."
"But can't it be repaired? It was in the clay, wasn't it?"
"Yes, but I fear for my exhausted enthusiasm. I can never do it as it was before. My poor, unlucky December."
She toyed with her glass absently, apparently for the moment forgetting her companion, who continued his supper with no less relish than before. He watched her keenly, however, fully aware that there was more to be told. He was a man too accustomed to follow any desire or indulge any whim not to notice appreciatively, as he had noticed many times before, how beautiful were the curves of his wife's arms and throat, and with what grace her head was poised. He had once defined a liberal man as one who could appreciate his own wife, and he would have been far more insensible than he was, if, with this beautiful woman before him he had not been, judged by his own standard, extremely liberal.
"And this has what to do with the question of our relations being known?" he asked.
She started from her reverie, the red again showing faintly in her cheek.
"It is hardly fair," she answered in a tone softer and lower than that in which she had been speaking, "to tell you all that Mr. Herman said. He wishes to marry me."