“I can’t think you mean it!” she said.
“Perhaps I don’t.... It’s hard to tell what one really does mean,” he said, discouraged. “I don’t mean that I shan’t keep on trying to write plays—if that’s what you are afraid of.”
“I’m not afraid,” she said. “Only, Felix—”
“Yes?”
“You must do what you want to do; not what you think I want you to do!”
“Why do you say that?” he asked; for it sounded cryptic, as if charged with hidden meanings.
“Because,” she said, “I think we’ve been going on a wrong basis. I’ve—done things to you I didn’t intend. I’m sorry.... And from now on I’m going to—let you alone.”
He laughed. “All right!” he said.
3
He thought he knew what she meant. Not in vain had dozens of novels been written in which the young wife subtly corrupts her artist husband into prosperous mediocrity. So that was what Rose-Ann was afraid of! She did not know that the artist chooses his wife in the profound unconscious hope of being led down from the perilous icy heights of lonely poetic ecstasy into the green valleys of everyday human life....