Marriage had hardly changed an outward detail of their lives. She had refused to give up her job, which he somehow expected she could do. Perhaps she could paint and try to sell her work. It appeared to him so much more fitting. But Moira did not wish to sell her paintings, even if she had thought them worth any money. All that could wait. Wasn’t his work waiting too? Poor boy! How could any one expect him to write with his time all taken up?
“But,” he objected, “I may have to take care of more than you one of these days. Hadn’t I better get used to it?”
“Nonsense,” she replied. “That’s all the more reason why I should be earning now.”
Miles had retained his room downstairs, much as it was, except that she saw it was kept in some sort of order for him. Her own tiny living quarters were not enough comfortably for two, and she had foreseen that he would have many a spell when he wanted to be quite alone. To her mind he was very chivalrous in hiding his low-spirited moments from her. When he left her early after dinner to spend the evening and the night in his room, she knew that it was a signal for one of these. He was working off some disappointment, some mood of defeat. These troubles had generally fled by morning. He would be in her bedroom, before she woke up, noisy and hungry, and full of jokes.
“You’re making me too happy to write,” he told her on one such occasion, as he sat on her bedside and put her hand to his lips. “You remember Rossetti says:
“By thine own tears thy song must tears beget
O Singer! Magic mirror thou hast none
Except thy manifest heart and save thine own
Anguish or ardour, else no amulet.”
He had the old-fashioned way of reading poetry, intoning it without much shading or expression—and he threw himself into it. She thought nobody was just like him when he did that entirely for his own pleasure.