"
"No," said Howard, "I cannot rise to that yet; I see, I dimly feel,
that you are far above me in this; but I cannot let Maud go. She is
mine, and I am hers."
Mrs. Graves smiled and said, "Well, we will leave it at that. Kiss
me, dearest boy; I don't love you less because I feel as I do--
perhaps even more, indeed."
XXXVI
THE TRUTH
It was a sunny day of winter with a sharp breeze blowing, just
after the birth of the New Year, that Howard and Maud left Windlow
for Cambridge. The weeks previous had been much clouded for Howard
by doubts and anxieties and a multiplicity of small business.
Furnishing even an official house for a life of graceful simplicity
involved intolerable lists, bills, letters, catalogues of things
which it seemed inconceivable that anyone should need. The very
number and variety of brushes required seemed to Howard an outrage
on the love of cheap beauty, so epigrammatically praised by
Thucydides; he said with a groan to Maud that it was indeed true
that the Nineteenth Century would stand out to all time as the
period of the world's history in which more useless things had been
made than at any epoch before!
But this morning, for some blessed reason, all his vexations seemed
to slip off from him. They were to start in the afternoon; but at
about eleven Maud in cloak and furred stole stepped into the
library and demanded a little walk. Howard looked approvingly,
admiringly, adoringly at his wife.
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