For himself it seemed to him that Mrs. Launce's opinion was nearest the
truth. There were parts of it that were good, chapters that were better
than anything in "Reuben Hallard" and then again there were many chapters
where he saw it all in a fog, groped dimly for his characters, pushed, as
it seemed to him, away from their lives and interests, by the actual lives
and interests of the real people about him. This led him to think of Clare
and here he was suddenly arrested by a perception, now only dimly grasped,
of a change in her attitude to his writings. He dated it, thinking of it
now for the first time, from the birth of young Stephen--or was it not
earlier than that, on that evening when they had met Cards at that supper
party, on that evening of their first quarrel?
In the early days how well he remembered Clare's enthusiasm--a little
extravagant, it seemed now. Then during the first year of their married
life she had wanted to know everything about the making of "The Stone
House." It was almost as though it had been a cake or a pie, and he knew
that he had found her questions difficult to answer and that he had had it
driven in upon him that it was not really because she was interested in the
subtleties of his art that she enquired but because of her own personal
affection for him; if he had been making boots or a suit of clothes it
would have been just the same.
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