“So had I,” I sympathised, and took her hand. “Suddenly I have remembered.”
She remained quite still. “There is so much to be done,” I said, almost apologetically.
She looked long away from me across the lagoon and at last sighed, like one who has drunk deeply, and turned to me.
“I suppose one ought not to be so happy,” she said. “Everything has been so beautiful and so simple and splendid. And clean. It has been just With You—the time of my life. It's a pity such things must end. But the world is calling you, dear.... I ought not to have forgotten it. I thought you were resting—and thinking. But if you are rested.—Would you like us to start to-morrow?”
She looked at once so fragile and so devoted that on the spur of the moment I relented, and we stayed in Venice four more days.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH ~~ THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER
1
Margaret had already taken a little house in Radnor Square, Westminster, before our marriage, a house that seemed particularly adaptable to our needs as public-spirited efficients; it had been very pleasantly painted and papered under Margaret's instructions, white paint and clean open purples and green predominating, and now we set to work at once upon the interesting business of arranging and—with our Venetian glass as a beginning—furnishing it. We had been fairly fortunate with our wedding presents, and for the most part it was open to us to choose just exactly what we would have and just precisely where we would put it.
Margaret had a sense of form and colour altogether superior to mine, and so quite apart from the fact that it was her money equipped us, I stood aside from all these matters and obeyed her summons to a consultation only to endorse her judgment very readily. Until everything was settled I went every day to my old rooms in Vincent Square and worked at a series of papers that were originally intended for the FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW, the papers that afterwards became my fourth book, “New Aspects of Liberalism.”