"Amy has ruined him," she said, when she had been at Battle Field long enough to feel free to open her heart wide. "It's only a question of time; he will give up his career entirely."
And, like the beginning of the fulfillment of her prophecy, there soon came a letter from him which she showed Neva. With much beating round the bush, he hinted dissolution of partnership. It gave Neva the heartache to read, and she hardly dared look at Narcisse. "I'm afraid you were right in your suspicions," she had to admit.
"Certainly I was right," replied Narcisse. "But I'm not really so cut up as you think. Nothing comes unannounced in this world, thank heaven. I've been getting ready for this ever since he told me they were engaged."
"How brave you are!" exclaimed Neva. "I know what you must feel, yet you can hide it."
"I'm hiding nothing," Narcisse assured her. "I've lived a long time—much longer than my birthdays show. I've been making my own living since I was thirteen—and it wasn't easy until the last few years. But I've learned to take life as I take weather. There are sunny seasons, and stormy seasons, and middling seasons. When the sun shines, I don't enjoy it less, but rather more, because I know foul weather is certain to come. And when it does come, I know it won't last forever." There were tears in her eyes, but through them she smiled dauntlessly. "And the sun will shine again—warm and bright and streaming happiness."
Neva's own heart was suddenly buoyant. "It will—it surely will!" she cried.
"And," proceeded Narcisse, "my troubles are trifles compared with Alois's. I know him; I know he's unhappy. If ever there was a man cheated in a marriage, that man is my poor brother. And he must realize it by this time."
She had guessed close to the truth. Alois and his bride had not been honeymooning many weeks before he confessed to himself that he had overestimated—or, perhaps, misestimated—her intellect. Not that she was stupid or ignorant; no, merely, that she lacked the originality he had attributed to her. He had pictured himself doing great work under her inspiration, his own skill supplemented by her taste and cleverness in suggesting and designing. He found that she knew only what he or some book had told her, that her enthusiasm for architecture was in large part one of those amiable pretenses wherewith the female aids the passions of the male to beguile him to her will.
But this discovery did not depress him. No man ever was depressed by finding out that his wife was his mental inferior, though many a man has been pitched headlong into permanent dejection by the discovery of the reverse. She was more beautiful than he had thought, more loving and more lovable—and those compensations more than made good the vanished dream of companionship. Soon, however, her intense affection began to wear upon him. Not that he liked it less or loved her less; but he saw with the beginnings of alarm that he was on the way to being engulfed, that he either must devote himself entirely to being Amy's husband or must expect to lose her. It was fascinating, intoxicating, to be thus encradled in love; but it was not exactly his notion of what was manly.
He talked of the work "they" would do, of the fame "they" would win; she responded with rapidly decreasing enthusiasm, finally listened without comment. Once, when he was expanding upon this subject, with some projected public buildings at Washington as the text, she suddenly threw herself into his arms, and cried, "Oh, let Narcisse take care of those things. We—you and I, dearest—have got only a little while to live. Let us be happy—happy—happy!"