Sometimes—not so often as she wished—he read what he had written, and they talked over the human considerations that go to make a play. He himself was most enthusiastic about the work, and to a great extent she shared his belief. There was, however, a certain chilliness in his lines and expressed thoughts, which by the gentlest tact she strove to warm.
It was a delicate enough operation in all conscience, for there is no machinery more difficult to guide than an artist’s mind, and none that demands overhaul more constantly. Hers was the task of tightening the bolts of a moving vehicle—one attended with grave risks to the mechanic. She took her satisfaction after the manner of a mechanic, by noting the smoother running and more even purr of the machine.
As they had determined upon their wedding day, the physical, and even the spiritual, side of their union was in abeyance. Of sweet intimacies and gentle understandings there were none. It was the work first, the work last, and the work which took precedence to all.
For Eve it was a lonely life—a life of unceasing mental and manual exercise. She strove with head and hand that his spirit might talk with posterity.
Sometimes there were knocks, but she took them bravely, looking always to the future to repay.
One morning in the early summer Wynne fretfully threw down his pen.
The whitey-gold sunshine was calling of bluebell woods and cloud shadows racing over the downs.
“I must get out,” he said—“out in the fields somewhere.”
Eve filled her lungs expectantly.
“Let’s go to Richmond,” she said. “Do you remember the first night I came back, and we said we’d go there one day and eat apple turnovers on the way home?”