"It isn't your fault, hubby-boy," Helen said, her face against mine. "You aren't meant to be a chemist. Your father has had you learn a profession which at best is no more than a secret anxiety to you. It haunts you with a never-ending fear, because it is not really your work. It's only a part you are trying to play to please him."
"I've watched you every day, Ted, sweetheart, during these months we have been together--and I have seen you struggling to fight down that fear of failure in you. You've tried to hide it from me, dearest"--she smiled and shook a finger at me--"you can't fool me, because I love you. I've wanted to tell you I knew, and I was afraid, if I did, you couldn't work at all."
"Well," I said slowly, "it's true. I hate chemistry--and I have always hated it--or is it only work I hate?"
Helen shook her head: "We must get to your real work, Ted, as soon as we can. There is your toy-theatre all ready for you on top of the bookcase. We'll begin writing for it, dear. When the company is all right, we'll give up chemistry forever and begin for ourselves."
I stood up and drew her to me under the light. I took her face in both my hands, turned it toward mine, and looked into her grey eyes.
She closed her eyes. "So much, Ted, it hurts and hurts clear down in me." Her hands clutched my shoulders until the skin grew white over her finger knuckles....
It is not possible that two persons could have been any happier than Helen and I were during Christmas week at Winchester. Others may have equalled our happiness; no couple have surpassed it. Not only was it the first time we had been by ourselves since on board the steamer, but also Winchester itself, as that very Camelot we had made up stories about in the woods back of Deep Harbor, was to us a speechless delight. I had not been there before, and thus its quaintness was as new to me as to Helen. We ate and slept in a hotel somewhere off the High Street. The rest of the time (despite the oncoming event of Edward Jevons, Junior) we wandered about or sat in the nave of the long bare cathedral. Helen actually got as far afoot as the summit of St. Catherine's hill. We took a fly and drove out to St. Cross, where we designed a new dream cottage from its mediaeval gables and timbers. The same faithful fly conducted us to other delights when I thought Helen had walked enough. There are more things in Winchester than can be set down, save in the book of memory. Jane Austen's house, the cathedral, the school, the river Itchen where old Izaak Walton fished--one can go on for a long time wandering among mysteries and dreaming. We grew technical over architecture and had an argument about it with a verger in the cathedral. On the High Street we likewise discovered a satisfactory second-hand bookshop containing a lot of theatrical memoirs. Joys of joys, we bought ourselves as a Christmas present Bell's British Theatre, complete with all the plates! To be sure, it was but a shilling a volume; yet no collector ever walked out of Christie's more proud than we. Forty shillings had been set aside for Christmas recklessness. Bell and his collection of plays made quite a hole in this, even at only a shilling a volume.