paragraph: "We learn that 'The Shadow,' painted by Bianca Stone, who is
not generally known to be the wife of the writer, Mr. Hilary Dallison,
will soon be exhibited at the Bencox Gallery. This very 'fin-de-siecle'
creation, with its unpleasant subject, representing a woman (presumably
of the streets) standing beneath a gas-lamp, is a somewhat anaemic piece
of painting. If Mr. Dallison, who finds the type an interesting one,
embodies her in one of his very charming poems, we trust the result will
be less bloodless."

The little piece of green-white paper containing this information was
handed to Hilary by his wife at breakfast. The blood mounted slowly in
his cheeks. Bianca's eyes fastened themselves on that flush. Whether
or no--as philosophers say--little things are all big with the past,
of whose chain they are the latest links, they frequently produce what
apparently are great results.

The marital relations of Hilary and his wife, which till then had been
those of, at all events, formal conjugality, changed from that moment.
After ten o'clock at night their lives became as separate as though
they lived in different houses. And this change came about without
expostulations, reproach, or explanation, just by the turning of a key;
and even this was the merest symbol, employed once only, to save the
ungracefulness of words. Such a hint was quite enough for a man like
Hilary, whose delicacy, sense of the ridiculous, and peculiar faculty
of starting back and retiring into himself, put the need of anything
further out of the question. Both must have felt, too, that there was
nothing that could be explained. An anonymous double entendre was not
precisely evidence on which to found a rupture of the marital tie. The
trouble was so much deeper than that--the throbbing of a woman's wounded
self-esteem, of the feeling that she was no longer loved, which had long