at any rate, was the extent to which she grasped the power which they wielded over his life.  Her fear, he judged, was simply due to those years in India, when for weeks at a time his calling took him away from her into the jungle forests, while she remained at home dreading all manner of evils that might befall him.  This, of course, explained her instinctive opposition to the passion for woods that still influenced and clung to him.  It was a natural survival of those anxious days of waiting in solitude for his safe return.

For Mrs. Bittacy, daughter of an evangelical clergy-man, was a self-sacrificing woman, who in most things found a happy duty in sharing her husband’s joys and sorrows to the point of self-obliteration.  Only in this matter of the trees she was less successful than in others.  It remained a problem difficult of compromise.

He knew, for instance, that what she objected to in this portrait of the cedar on their lawn was really not the price he had given for it, but the unpleasant way in which the transaction emphasized this breach between their common interests—­the only one they had, but deep.

Sanderson, the artist, earned little enough money by his strange talent; such checks were few and far between.  The owners of fine or interesting trees who cared to have them painted singly were rare indeed, and the “studies” that he made for his own delight he also kept for his own delight.  Even were there buyers, he would not sell them.  Only a few, and these peculiarly intimate friends, might even see them, for he disliked to hear the undiscerning criticisms of those who did not understand.  Not that he minded laughter at his craftsmanship—­he admitted it with scorn—­but that remarks about the personality of the tree itself could easily wound or anger him.  He resented slighting observations concerning them, as though insults offered to personal friends who could not answer for themselves.  He was instantly up in arms.

“It really is extraordinary,” said a Woman who Understood, “that you can make that cypress seem an individual, when in reality all cypresses are so exactly alike.”

And though the bit of calculated flattery had come so near to saying the right, true, thing, Sanderson flushed as though she had slighted a friend beneath his very nose.  Abruptly he passed in front of her and turned the picture to the wall.

“Almost as queer,” he answered rudely, copying her silly emphasis, “as that you should have imagined individuality in your husband, Madame, when in reality all men are so exactly alike!”

Since the only thing that differentiated her husband from the mob was the money for which she had married him, Sanderson’s relations with that particular family terminated on the spot, chance of prospective orders with it.  His sensitiveness, perhaps, was morbid.  At any rate the way to reach his heart lay through his trees.  He might be said to love trees.  He certainly drew a splendid inspiration from them, and the source of a man’s inspiration, be it music, religion, or a woman, is never a safe thing to criticize.