‘Your thoughts are wonderfully like my father’s, sometimes,’ said Nancy.

’From what you have told me of him, I think we should have agreed in a good many things.’

’And how unfortunate we were!  If he had recovered from that illness, —­if he had lived only a few months,—­everything would have been made easy.’

‘For me altogether too easy,’ Tarrant observed.

‘It has been a good thing for you to have to work,’ Nancy assented.  ’I understand the change for the better in you.  But’—­she smiled —­’you have more self-will than you used to have.’

’That’s just where I have gained.—­But don’t think that I find it easy or pleasant to resist your wish.  I couldn’t do it if I were not so sure that I am acting for your advantage as well as my own.  A man who finds himself married to a fool, is a fool himself if he doesn’t take his own course regardless of his wife.  But I am in a very different position; I love you more and more, Nancy, because I am learning more and more to respect you; I think of your happiness most assuredly as much as I think of my own.  But even if my own good weighed as nothing against yours, I should be wise to resist you just as I do now.  Hugger-mugger marriage is a defilement and a curse.  We know it from the experience of the world at large,—­ which is perhaps more brutalised by marriage than by anything else.  —­No need to test the thing once more, to our own disaster.’

’What I think is, that, though you pay me compliments, you really have a very poor opinion of me.  You think I should burden and worry you in endless silly ways.  I am not such a simpleton.  In however small a house, there could be your rooms and mine.  Do you suppose I should interfere with your freedom in coming and going?’

’Whether you meant to or not, you would—­so long as we are struggling with poverty.  However self-willed I am, I am not selfish; and to see you living a monotonous, imprisoned life would be a serious hindrance to me in my own living and working.  Of course the fact is so at present, and I often enough think in a troubled way about you; but you are out of my sight, and that enables me to keep you out of mind.  If I am away from home till one or two in the morning, there is no lonely wife fretting and wondering about me.  For work such as mine, I must live as though I were not married at all.’

‘But suppose we got out of our poverty,’ urged Nancy, ’you would be living the same life, I suppose; and how would it be any better for you or me that we had a large house instead of a small one?’

’Your position will be totally changed.  When money comes, friends come.  You are not hiding away from Society because you are unfit for it, only because you can’t live as your social equals do.  When you have friends of your own, social engagements, interests on every hand, I shall be able to go my own way without a pang of conscience.  When we come together, it will be to talk of your affairs as well as of mine.  Living as you do now, you have nothing on earth but the baby to think about—­a miserable state of things for a woman with a mind.  I know it is miserable, and I’m struggling tooth and nail to help you out of it.’