one much in the habit of giving orders to inferiors. Her nose would have been perfect but for ever so slight a crook which made it preferable to view her in full face than in profile; her lips curved sharply out, and when she straightened them of a sudden, the effect was not reassuring to anyone who had counted upon her for facile humour. In harmony with the broad shoulders, she had a strong neck; as she bore the lamp into the room a slight turn of her head showed splendid muscles from the ear downward. It was a magnificently clear-cut bust; one thought, in looking at her, of the newly-finished head which some honest sculptor has wrought with his own hand from the marble block; there was a suggestion of ‘planes’ and of the chisel. The atmosphere was cold; ruddiness would have been quite out of place on her cheeks, and a flush must have been the rarest thing there.
Her age was not quite two-and-twenty; she had been wedded nearly two years, and had a child ten months old.
As for her dress, it was unpretending in fashion and colour, but of admirable fit. Every detail of her appearance denoted scrupulous personal refinement. She walked well; you saw that the foot, however gently, was firmly planted. When she seated herself her posture was instantly graceful, and that of one who is indifferent about support for the back.
‘What is the matter?’ she began. ‘Why can’t you get on with the story?’
It was the tone of friendly remonstrance, not exactly of affection, not at all of tender solicitude.
Reardon had risen and wished to approach her, but could not do so directly. He moved to another part of the room, then came round to the back of her chair, and bent his face upon her shoulder.
‘Amy—’
‘Well.’
‘I think it’s all over with me. I don’t think I shall write any more.’
‘Don’t be so foolish, dear. What is to prevent your writing?’
‘Perhaps I am only out of sorts. But I begin to be horribly afraid. My will seems to be fatally weakened. I can’t see my way to the end of anything; if I get hold of an idea which seems good, all the sap has gone out of it before I have got it into working shape. In these last few months, I must have begun a dozen different books; I have been ashamed to tell you of each new beginning. I write twenty pages, perhaps, and then my courage fails. I am disgusted with the thing, and can’t go on with it—can’t! My fingers refuse to hold the pen. In mere writing, I have done enough to make much more than three volumes; but it’s all destroyed.’
‘Because of your morbid conscientiousness. There was no need to destroy what you had written. It was all good enough for the market.’
‘Don’t use that word, Amy. I hate it!’
‘You can’t afford to hate it,’ was her rejoinder, in very practical tones. ‘However it was before, you must write for the market now. You have admitted that yourself.’
He kept silence.
‘Where are you?’ she went on to ask. ‘What have you actually done?’
‘Two short chapters of a story I can’t go on with. The three volumes lie before me like an interminable desert. Impossible to get through them. The idea is stupidly artificial, and I haven’t a living character in it.’
‘The public don’t care whether the characters are living or not.—Don’t stand behind me, like that; it’s such an awkward way of talking. Come and sit down.’
He drew away, and came to a position whence he could see her face, but kept at a distance.
‘Yes,’ he said, in a different way, ‘that’s the worst of it.’
‘What is?’
‘That you—well, it’s no use.’
‘That I—what?’
She did not look at him; her lips, after she had spoken, drew in a little.
‘That your disposition towards me is being affected by this miserable failure. You keep saying to yourself that I am not what you thought me. Perhaps you even feel that I have been guilty of a sort of deception. I don’t blame you; it’s natural enough.’
‘I’ll tell you quite honestly what I do think,’ she replied, after a short silence. ‘You are much weaker than I imagined. Difficulties crush you, instead of rousing you to struggle.’
‘True. It has always been my fault.’
‘But don’t you feel it’s rather unmanly, this state of things? You say you love me, and I try to believe it. But whilst you are saying so, you let me get nearer and nearer to miserable, hateful poverty. What is to become of me—of us? Shall you sit here day after day until our last shilling is spent?’
‘No; of course I must do something.’
‘When shall you begin in earnest? In a day or two you must pay this quarter’s rent, and that will leave us just about fifteen pounds in the world. Where is the rent at Christmas to come from?
What are we to live upon? There’s all sorts of clothing to be bought; there’ll be all the extra expenses of winter. Surely it’s bad enough that we have had to stay here all the summer; no holiday of any kind. I have done my best not to grumble about it, but I begin to think that it would be very much wiser if I did grumble.’
She squared her shoulders, and gave her head just a little shake, as if a fly had troubled her.
‘You bear everything very well and kindly,’ said Reardon. ‘My behaviour is contemptible; I know that. Good heavens! if I only had some business to go to, something I could work at in any state of mind, and make money out of! Given this chance, I would work myself to death rather than you should lack anything you desire. But I am at the mercy of my brain; it is dry and powerless. How I envy those clerks who go by to their offices in the morning! There’s the day’s work cut out for them; no question of mood and feeling; they have just to work at something, and when the evening comes, they have earned their wages, they are free to rest and enjoy themselves. What an insane thing it is to make literature one’s only means of support! When the most trivial accident may at any time prove fatal to one’s power of work for weeks or months. No, that is the unpardonable sin! To make a trade of an art! I am rightly served for attempting such a brutal folly.’
He turned away in a passion of misery.
‘How very silly it is to talk like this!’ came in Amy’s voice, clearly critical. ‘Art must be practised as a trade, at all events in our time. This is the age of trade. Of course if one refuses to be of one’s time, and yet hasn’t the means to live independently, what can result but breakdown and wretchedness? The fact of the matter is, you could do fairly good work, and work which would sell, if only you would bring yourself to look at things in a more practical way. It’s what Mr Milvain is always saying, you know.’
‘Milvain’s temperament is very different from mine. He is naturally light-hearted and hopeful; I am naturally the opposite.
What you and he say is true enough; the misfortune is that I can’t act upon it. I am no uncompromising artistic pedant; I am quite willing to try and do the kind of work that will sell; under the circumstances it would be a kind of insanity if I refused. But power doesn’t answer to the will. My efforts are utterly vain; I suppose the prospect of pennilessness is itself a hindrance; the fear haunts me. With such terrible real things pressing upon me, my imagination can shape nothing substantial. When I
