“No, you shan’t go to bed just yet, you sleepy old thing. I really don’t feel as though I’d seen anything of you at all this week. And I want to hear all about everything, all about the book. You haven’t told me a thing.”
He moved his hand. “I say, my dear, you’ll be getting the most frightful cold sitting in a draught like that. You’d much better come to bed and we’ll talk to-morrow.”
But she smiled at him. “No, Fred, I’m going to talk to you. I’m going to give you a sermon. You haven’t been a bit nice to me all this time here. I know I’ve been horrid, but then that’s woman’s privilege; and you know a woman’s only horrid because she wants a man to be nice, and I wanted you to be nice. This summer weather and everything makes it seem like those first days, the honeymoon at that sweet little place in Switzerland, you remember. That night . . .” She sighed and pressed his hand.
He patted her hand. “Yes, dear, of course I remember. Do you suppose I shall ever forget it? We’ll go out to-morrow somewhere and have an afternoon together alone. Without these people hanging round. I ought to get the chapter finished to-morrow morning.”
He moved back from the chair.
“What chapter, dear?” She leaned back over the chair, looking up in his face. “You know, I wish you’d let me share your work a little. I don’t know how many years we haven’t been married now, and you’ve always kept me outside it. A wife ought to know about it. Just at first you did tell me things a little and I was so frightfully interested. And I’m sure I could help you, dear. There are things a woman knows.”
He smiled at the thought of the way that she would help him. He would never be able to show her the necessity of doing it all alone, both for him and for her. That part of his life he must keep to himself. He remembered that he had thought before their marriage that she would be able to help. She had seemed so ready to sympathise and understand. But he had speedily discovered the hopelessness of it. Not only was she of no assistance, but she even hindered him.
She took the feeble, the bad parts of the book and praised; she handled his beautiful delicacy, the so admirably balanced sentences, the little perfect expressions that had flown to him from some rich Paradise where they had waited during an eternity of years for some one to use them—she had taken these rare treasures of his and trampled on them, flung them to the winds, demanded their rejection.
She had never for a moment seen his work at all; the things that she had seen had not been there, the things that she had not seen were the only jewels that he possessed. The discovery had not pained him; he had not loved her for that, the grasping and sharing of his writing, but for the other things that were there for him, just as charmingly as before. But he could not bear to have his work touched by the fingers of those who did not understand. When people came and asked him about it and praised it just because it was the thing to do, he felt as though some one had flung some curtain aside and exposed his body, naked, to a grinning world.
And it was this, in a lesser degree, that she did. She was only asking, like the rest, because it was the thing to do, because she would be able to say to the world that she helped him; she did not care for the thing, its beauty and solemnity and grace, she did not even see that it was beautiful, solemn, or graceful.