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He was going on that afternoon to explain to me how, in a marriage free from the disturbances of passion incidental to temperamental matings, I should be at ease to give myself wholly to the business of book-making. With all his understanding, Herman was fully possessed of that Academic notion that literature can be produced by taking pains instead of having them. He was very patient with me through it all, crediting my indifference to overwork and to nerves, as a man does with a woman when he is at a loss to know what is the matter with her. The truth was, if I was tired of anything, it was of being the very things Herman most admired in me. I was growing every moment more exasperated. By the time he had got to the point of wanting to know what more there was that he could say, I had reached the pitch of replying that there could be nothing more unless he wished to say the usual thing.

“And that?” He turned to me with a sincere and astonished inquiry in his lifted brows.

“Would be merely that you love me and can’t live without me.”