in his own interest. But she found excuses for him,
which at times she made reproaches. She vaguely perceived
that his paint was something more than business to him;
it was a sentiment, almost a passion. He could not
share its management and its profit with another without
a measure of self-sacrifice far beyond that which he must
make with something less personal to him. It was the
poetry of that nature, otherwise so intensely prosaic;
and she understood this, and for the most part forbore.
She knew him good and true and blameless in all his life,
except for this wrong, if it were a wrong; and it was only
when her nerves tingled intolerably with some chance renewal
of the pain she had suffered, that she shared her anguish
with him in true wifely fashion.

With those two there was never anything like an
explicit reconciliation. They simply ignored a quarrel;
and Mrs. Lapham had only to say a few days after
at breakfast, "I guess the girls would like to go round
with you this afternoon, and look at the new house,"
in order to make her husband grumble out as he looked
down into his coffee-cup. "I guess we better all go, hadn't we?"

"Well, I'll see," she said.

There was not really a great deal to look at when Lapham
arrived on the ground in his four-seated beach-wagon.
But the walls were up, and the studding had already
given skeleton shape to the interior. The floors were
roughly boarded over, and the stairways were in place,