the juncture that his wife is the only aptitude he can contribute to it. She remembers his profuse suggestions with a touch of scorn. Is he a man?
"What beast was it, then,
That made you break this enterprise to me?
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
. . . Nor time, nor place,
Did then adhere, and yet you would make both;
They have made themselves, and that their fitness now
Does unmake you."
Strenuous in fantasy, "infirm of purpose." The sudden crisis betrays the secret pinings of past years for such an hour. The whispered conferences swell into a din: it shouts to tell us how their pillows touched, when darkness brooded in vain upon eyelids that were set wide open with a stare at a gleam of greatness far outside their chamber. We overhear, without ever having played eavesdropper, the anxious interchange of feeling beneath the garden aspens, which might catch their tremor from these two beings who passed hankering to and fro; he encouraging a reverie, she trying to chastise it into action with the valor of her tongue. Thus the years passed, while he alternated between the grand loyalty of many a fight and the treachery which grew warm upon the bosom of his wife. Much given to pondering and pleased with vivid day-dreams, he sought no way to realize them. Well as she knew this musing vein of his, and much as it displeased her spirit of action, she will have to be re-enforced by opportunity. Then the deed, now rusting in its sheath of speculation, may possibly leap forth. His mind did not have the
