He would hurry through dinner, giving short replies to his young wife (they had no children), and walk up to his study. He would then close the door, light his pipe, and surrender himself to the backward sweep of his thoughts. And at those moments an age-old, unborn life seemed to come up from the pile of books and reviews which littered his desk, working subtly to bring about a transformation of himself.
He pondered with an ever-growing measure of bitterness over the fact that his wife, college-bred and, like himself, the descendant of three academic, well-laundried generations, did not understand these moods. She loved him with a fine, precise love; and he loved her. There was no doubt of it. For she was an honest, upstanding woman.
But in the depths of his soul he resented the fact that with the unconscious selfishness of the good woman she had folded him in completely, that day after day she tried to reach more deeply into the core of himself, without ever guessing or feeling that her mate had an imaginative quality and an imaginative double life which was as literally real to him as a house, a tree, or a flower.
Thus he blamed her because she did not compre-
