love, without a care, painting my pictures at ease, with a sweet woman worshipping me, ever at my beck and call, and shielding me from trouble with all the tender force of her passionate little soul!—­but commonplace life will net fit itself into these sort of beatific visions!  Babies, and the necessary provision of food and clothes and servants—­this is what marriage means—­love having sobered down to a matter-of-fact conclusion.  No—­no!  I will not marry her!  It would be like catching a fairy in the woods, cutting off its sunbeam wings and setting it to scrub the kitchen floor!”

It was curious that while he pleased himself with this fanciful soliloquy it did not occur to him that he had already caught the “fairy in the woods,” and ever since the capture had been engaged in cutting off its “sunbeam wings” with all a vivisector’s scientific satisfaction.  And in his imaginary pictures of what might have been if “ideals” were realised, he did not for a moment conceive himself as “worshipping” the woman who was to worship him, or as being at her “beck and call,” or as shielding her from trouble—­oh no!  He merely considered himself, and how she would care for him,—­never once did he consider how he would care for her.

Meanwhile things went on in an outwardly even and uneventful course.  Innocent worked steadily to fulfil certain contracts into which she had entered with the publishers who were eager to obtain as much of her work as she could give them,—­but she had lost heart, and her once soaring ambition was like a poor bird that had been clumsily shot at, and had fallen to the ground with a broken wing.  What she had dreamed of as greatness, now seemed vain and futile.  The “Amadis de Jocelin” of the sixteenth century had taught her to love literature—­to believe in it as the refiner of thought and expression, and to use it as a charm to inspire the mind and uplift the soul,—­but the Amadis de Jocelyn of the twentieth had no such lessons to teach.  Utterly lacking in reverence for great thinkers, he dismissed the finest passages of poetry or prose from his consideration with light scorn as “purple patches,” borrowing that hackneyed phrase from the lower walks of the press,—­the most inspired writers, both of ancient and modern times, came equally under the careless lash of his derision,—­so that Innocent, utterly bewildered by his sweeping denunciation of many brilliant and famous authors, shrank into her wounded self with pain, humiliation and keen disappointment, feeling that there was certainly no chance for her to appeal to him in any way through the thoughts she cherished and expressed with truth and fervour to a listening world.  That world listened—­but he did not!—­therefore the world seemed worthless and its praise mere mockery.  She had no vanity to support her,—­she was not “strong-minded” enough to oppose her own individuality to that of the man she loved.  And so she began to droop a little,—­her