"Nothing—not a thing." I waited. "There was a fool skit in one of the St. Louis papers," he admitted. "The fool reporter didn't know I was married."
"It was about you and Miss Filette?" He nodded.
"She had bought all the St. Louis papers," he said, meaning his wife.
"Well, that was natural; she wanted to read the notices; she was always proud of you."
"She believed them too," he groaned. "And she's talked her mother over. They wouldn't even let me see the children." He put his head down on my table and sobbed aloud. I thought it might be good for him, but by and by my sensibilities got the better of me.
"Would it do any good if I were to write?"
"You? Oh, they think you're in it ... a kind of general conspiracy. You know you said that—that one of the things nobody had a right to deny an artist was the source of his inspiration."
"Jerry! I said what you asked me." I was properly indignant too, when I had been so right on the whole matter. Besides, as Jerry had written little that winter except some inconsiderable additions to his play, I was rather of the opinion that he measured the validity of his passion by its importunity, rather than its effect on the sum of his production. "Besides, I told you you would never get your wife to understand."
"If she would only be sensible," he groaned.
"She isn't," I reminded him; "you didn't marry her to be sensible, but for her imagined capacity to go on repeating the tricks by which Miss Filette keeps you complacent with yourself. The trouble is, marriage and having children take that out of a woman."