desperate. He killed himself."

"When he was drunk. Marshby wasn't responsible."

"No, not directly. But you know that kind of mind. It follows hidden
causes. That's why his essays are so good. Anyway, it has crippled him.
It came when he was too young, and it marked him for life. He has an
inveterate self-distrust."

"Ah, well," said Winner, including the summer landscape in a wave of his
brush, "give up the consulship. Let him give it up. It isn't as if he
hadn't a roof. Settle down in his house there, you two, and let him
write his essays, and you--just be happy."

She ignored her own part in the prophecy completely and finally. "It
isn't the consulship as the consulship," she responded. "It is the life
abroad I want for him. It would give him--well, it would give him what
it has given you. His work would show it." She spoke hotly, and at once
Jerome saw himself envied for his brilliant cosmopolitan life, the
bounty of his success fairly coveted for the other man. It gave him a
curious pang. He felt, somehow, impoverished, and drew his breath more
meagrely. But the actual thought in his mind grew too big to be
suppressed, and he stayed his hand to look at her.

"That's not all," he said.

"All what?"

"That's not the main reason why you want him to go. You think if he
really asserted himself, really knocked down the spectre of his old