"Too many things--too many things!" Paul said, quoting St. George's
exclamation of a few days before.

"Ah yes, for him there are too many--his life's too complicated."

"Have you seen it _near_? That's what I should like to do; it might
explain some mysteries," her visitor went on. She asked him what
mysteries he meant, and he said: "Oh peculiarities of his work,
inequalities, superficialities. For one who looks at it from the
artistic point of view it contains a bottomless ambiguity."

She became at this, on the spot, all intensity. "Ah do describe that
more--it's so interesting. There are no such suggestive questions. I'm
so fond of them. He thinks he's a failure--fancy!" she beautifully
wailed.

"That depends on what his ideal may have been. With his gifts it ought
to have been high. But till one knows what he really proposed to
himself--? Do _you_ know by chance?" the young man broke off.

"Oh he doesn't talk to me about himself. I can't make him. It's too
provoking."

Paul was on the point of asking what then he did talk about, but
discretion checked it and he said instead: "Do you think he's unhappy at
home?"

She seemed to wonder. "At home?"

"I mean in his relations with his wife. He has a mystifying little way