It was strange sometimes to feel that she was entering the world of dreams just as he was leaving it.
One hot July evening, when he wanted to work on his play, she insisted on his coming outdoors with her. “You don’t want to work,” she said. “You know it!”
“Isn’t that a good reason for working, perhaps?” he said. He had that day had a note from Hawkins in New York, and Hawkins’s patient plodding and prospective success were making him feel ashamed of his own laziness.
She showed a touch of her old impatience. “Has it come to this!” she said. “Felix, do you really think the way to be an artist is to do all the things you don’t want to do? I wonder if you take our marriage in the same spirit! Am I a duty, too?”
“Ridiculous child!” he said, and went out with her.
“We’re going to take a ride on the lagoon,” she said, and led him to the landing place, where a little launch presently chugged up and discharged its dozen passengers. Felix and Rose-Ann clambered in, and sat in the bow. The other waiting people followed them, and the boat started slowly out into the mysterious islanded waters, stabbing with its searchlight into the warm thick darkness and revealing with that unearthly light, here and there, some place of trees bending to dip their boughs into the water—the edge of one of the islands around and past which they steered slowly, turning and winding about until they seemed to be exploring a vast islanded wilderness. The breeze stirred faintly the hair of their bared heads. The others of the party appeared to be lovers happily entranced with love and with the mysterious beauty of this realm which it seemed could hardly exist in the confines of a mere park. No one spoke, except in whispers.
“Life ought to be like this,” whispered Rose-Ann, taking his hand. “Not arranged and planned!”
A little later, she whispered fiercely: “Felix, are you thinking of that damned play? Then stop it!”
It was true. Felix had been thinking of his play. He became annoyed with her. She wanted him to write plays, to be a personage—and now, when he tried....
As if in reply to his thought, she bent and said in his ear, “Felix, if you write a conventional play like Hawkins’s, and make a success of it, I shall leave you!”