“I missed—­the thing I am talking about, and it has been the great sorrow of my life—­not only on my account, but on my husband’s.  And so far as I am concerned, I am telling you the truth when I say I should have been content to have lived in a log cabin if—­if the gift had been mine.  Not all the money in the world, nor the intellect, nor the philanthropy—­the so-called interests of life, will satisfy me for its denial.  I am a disappointed woman, I sometimes think a bitter woman.  I can’t believe that life is meant to be so.  Those energies have gone into ambition which should have been absorbed by—­by something more worth while.

“And I can see so plainly now that my husband would have been far, far happier with another kind of woman.  I drew him away from the only work he ever enjoyed—­his painting.  I do not say he ever could have been a great artist, but he had a little of the divine spark, in his enthusiasm at least—­in his assiduity.  I shall never forget our first trip abroad, after we were married—­he was like a boy in the galleries, in the studios.  I could not understand it then.  I had no real sympathy with art, but I tried to make sacrifices, what I thought were Christian sacrifices.  The motive power was lacking, and no matter how hard I tried, I was only half-hearted, and he realized it instinctively—­no amount of feigning could deceive him.  Something deep in me, which was a part of my nature, was antagonistic, stultifying to the essentials of his own being.  Of course neither of us saw that then, but the results were not long in developing.  To him, art was a sacred thing, and it was impossible for me to regard it with equal seriousness.  He drew into himself,—­closed up, as it were,—­no longer discussed it.  I was hurt.  And when we came home he kept on in business—­he still had his father’s affairs to look after—­but he had a little workroom at the top of the house where he used to go in the afternoon . . . .

“It was a question which one of us should be warped,—­which personality should be annihilated, so to speak, and I was the stronger.  And as I look back, Mr. Hodder, what occurred seems to me absolutely inevitable, given the ingredients, as inevitable as a chemical process.  We were both striving against each other, and I won—­at a tremendous cost.  The conflict, one might say, was subconscious, instinctive rather than deliberate.  My attitude forced him back into business, although we had enough to live on very comfortably, and then the scale of life began to increase, luxuries formerly unthought of seemed to become necessities.  And while it was still afar off I saw a great wave rolling toward us, the wave of that new prosperity which threatened to submerge us, and I seized the buoy fate had placed in our hands,—­or rather, by suggestion, I induced my husband to seize it—­his name.