She came up and took him by the shoulders so violently that it might almost be said she shook him.  “You can’t let go like that.  It’s too late.  Everything I’ve got in the world is mixed up in it.”  She must have read his unspoken thought there for she went on, “Oh, I suppose you’d say I’d still have John if I did fail.  Well, I wouldn’t.  He’s mixed up in it, too.  He’d never forgive me if I failed.  It’s the fear I’ll fail and make myself look cheap and ridiculous that makes him hate it so.  Well, I’m not going to.  Make up your mind to that!”

Later, when he was leaving, under a promise to improve some of the passages they had been arguing about, she reverted to this aspect of the matter and added something.  “John can see what a failure would mean.  But what the other thing—­the big real success—­would mean to both of us, he hasn’t the faintest idea of.  He won’t till I get it.”

“He’s a famous person, himself, of course,” March observed, not without a gleam of mischief.

She echoed the word quite blankly, and he went on to amplify.

“That European Medical Commission that was out here a few weeks ago attended some of his clinics in a body.  I don’t suppose there’s a first-class hospital anywhere in this country or in Europe where his name isn’t known.  That operation he did on Sarah turned out to be a classic, you know.  He used a new technique in it which has become standard since.”

But it seemed to him that she still looked incredulous when he went away, incapable of really digesting that idea at all.  No, he wouldn’t have bet much on the chance that any great success of hers could reunite them.  The love life that they had been enjoying this last five years hadn’t thrown out any radicles to bind them together—­children for instance.

March wondered why there had been no children.  He was not inclined to accept the obvious explanation that she hadn’t wanted any.  She had spoken once of her childlessness in a tone that didn’t quite square with that explanation.  Nor had she said it quite as she would, had she felt that her husband shared equally in her disappointment.  It was all very intangible, of course, just the way she inflected the sentence, “You see, I haven’t any children.”  Was it John that didn’t want them?  Well, he had two of his own, of course.  Had he shrunk from having this new passion of his domesticated?  And then he was a gynecologist.  Was he, perhaps, afraid for her?  That explanation had a sort of plausibility about it for Anthony March.  If that were true, his caution had only brought him face to face with a greater risk.  March felt sorry for John Wollaston.

But it quite truly never occurred to him to hold himself in the smallest degree responsible for the husband’s troubles.  To a man with a better developed possessive sense, it might have occurred that he was poaching in another’s preserves.  When a husband made it plain that he chose to keep a particularly rare and valuable possession such as a wife like Paula must be considered, in the tower of brass LaChaise had talked about, it became the duty of every other well-disposed male to take pains to leave no keys, rope ladders or files lying about by which she might effect her escape.  But a consideration of this sort would not even have been intelligible to March, let alone troublesome.