He was silent a moment, staring out of the window.  ’Then there’s another thing,’ he went on, ’this constant grind leaves me no time to get on with my play.  If I could only get it finished it might bring me success—­even fame.  But how shall I ever get the leisure to complete it?’

A feeling of compunction swept over me.  I went up to him and put my hand on his shoulder.  ’Henry, dear old chap, I never thought you felt like this about things.’  Certainly he was writing a play, but as he had been engaged on it now for over ten years (Henry is a conscientious writer), my interest in it was not so keen as it had been when he first told me of the idea a decade previously.

‘Couldn’t you do a little of your play every evening after dinner?’ I suggested.

’I’m too brain weary by that time—­my ideas seem to have given out.  Sometimes I think I must renounce the notion of going on with it—­and it’s been one of my greatest ambitions.’

I smoothed his hair tenderly, noticing how heavily flecked it was with grey and how it silvered at the temples.  Poor Henry, he reminded me just then of L’homme a la cervelle d’or, a fantastic story of Daudet’s, where he tells of a man possessed of a brain of gold which he tore out, atom by atom, to buy gifts for the woman he loved until, in the end (she being an extravagant type), he was left without a scrap of brain to call his own and so expired.  The man was, of course, supposed to be a writer, and the brain of gold his ideas.  It made me feel quite uneasy to think that Henry, too, might be, metaphorically speaking, steadily divesting himself of brain day by day in order to support The Kid and me in comfort.

‘I ought not to grumble,’ he said at last.  ’Very few people can do what they want to in this world.  Take you, my dear, for instance.  You are not following your natural bent when you write those articles for the Woman’s Page.’

’I should hope not—­I loathe ’em,’ I said viciously.

‘There’s one thing about it,’ he went on musingly, ’we’ll see that The Kid has every chance when she grows up.’

We are looking forward very much to the time when The Kid will be grown up.  Henry says he pictures her moving silently about the house, tall, graceful, helpful, smoothing his brow when he is wearied, keeping his papers in order, correcting his proofs and doing all his typing for him.  I, too, for my part, have visions of her taking all household cares off my shoulders, mending, cooking, making my blouses and her own clothes, and playing Beethoven to us in the evenings when our work is done.  In her spare time we anticipate that she will write books and plays that will make her famous.

We have visions of these things, I repeat—­generally when The Kid is in bed asleep with her hands folded on her breast in a devotional attitude, a cherubic smile on her lips.  There are, however, other times when I hope for nothing more exacting than the day to come when she will keep herself clean.