“Indeed!” with some doubtfulness of countenance, almost amounting to chagrin—“indeed! how is it that I so seldom see you, then?”
“The cares of a household, I suppose, might be my sufficient excuse. While my liege lord works abroad, I find my duties sufficiently urgent to task all my time at home.”
“Really—but you do not propose to abandon the atelier entirely? Clifford himself, with his great fondness for the art, will scarcely be satisfied that you should, even on a pretence of work.”
“I do not know. I do not think that MY HUSBAND”—the last two words certainly emphasized—“cares much about it. I suspect that music and painting, however much they delighted and employed our girlhood, form but a very insignificant part of our duties and enjoyments when we get married.”
“But you do not mean to say that a fine landscape, or an exquisite head, gives you less satisfaction than before your marriage?”
“I confess they do. Life is a very different thing before and after marriage. It seems far more serious—it appears to me a possession now, and time a sort of property which has to be economized and doled out almost as cautiously as money. I have not touched a brush this fortnight. I doubt if I have been in the painting-room more than once in all this time.”
This conversation, which evidently discomfited William Elgerton, was productive to me of no small satisfaction. After a brief interval, consumed in silence, he resumed it:—
“But I must certainly get you to see these pictures. Nay, I must also—since you keep at home—persuade you to look into the studio tomorrow, if it be only to flatter my vanity by looking at a sketch which I have amused myself upon the last three mornings. By-the-way, why may we not look at it tonight?”
“We shall not be able to examine it carefully by night,” was the answer, as I fancied, spoken with unwonted coldness and deliberation.
“So much the better for me,” he replied, with an ineffectual attempt to laugh; “you will be less able to discern its defects.”