She wanted him to read his story to her before it was printed; but this was just the one thing he could not do. He could not imagine himself reading his own words.
"It would make me hate my work," he said. "Every clumsy phrase, every banal word, would leap out of the page and gibber at me as I read. I will bring you the first copy fresh from the press, and when you have read it you shall tell me afterwards whether I am ever to write another story."
"You shall write another, and another, and go on writing," she answered gaily. "You will give me a second world, a world peopled with strange or lovely creatures—villains as colossal as Milton's Satan, heroines as innocent as his Eve. My life in the world of your imagining will be almost as intense as your own. You will give me a second existence, better than the everyday world. You will tell me about your dream-people, won't you, Arthur, as they spring into life?"
"The fear is that I shan't be able to refrain from talking of them, to the other half of my soul."
"You cannot weary the other half by much talking."
"Do you think not? I can imagine a husband's art becoming an unspeakable bore to his wife."
"Not if she loves him and loves his art."
"Ah, there's the rub."
Lady Perivale was recalled from the shadow-world of the novelist by the substantial apparition of John Faunce, who arrived unannounced on a sultry afternoon, and found her sitting in the garden with Mr. Haldane and Miss Rodney, at a table strewn with all the new magazines and some of the old poets, in those miniature editions that so lend themselves to being carried about and not read.
"I thought I might venture to call without notice," said Faunce, "as I have some rather important news for your ladyship."