 days before he possessed her love; for now that he
did possess her love, the possession of her was far away as ever. He had asked
for two years; time was flying, and he was achieving nothing. Again, he was
always conscious of the fact that she did not approve what he was doing. She did
not say so directly. Yet indirectly she let him understand it as clearly and
definitely as she could have spoken it. It was not resentment with her, but
disapproval; though less sweet-natured women might have resented where she was
no more than disappointed. Her disappointment lay in that this man she had taken
to mould, refused to be moulded. To a certain extent she had found his clay
plastic, then it had developed stubbornness, declining to be shaped in the image
of her father or of Mr. Butler.
    What was great and strong in him, she missed, or, worse yet, misunderstood.
This man, whose clay was so plastic that he could live in any number of
pigeonholes of human existence, she thought wilful and most obstinate because
she could not shape him to live in her pigeonhole, which was the only one she
knew. She could not follow the flights of his mind, and when his brain got
beyond her, she deemed him erratic. Nobody else's brain ever got beyond her. She
could always follow her father and mother, her brothers and Olney; wherefore,
when she could not follow Martin, she believed the fault lay with him. It was
the old tragedy of insularity trying to serve as mentor to the universal.
    »You worship at the shrine of the established,« he told her once, in a
discussion they had over Praps and Vanderwater. »I grant that as authorities to
quote they are most excellent - the two foremost literary critics in the United
States. Every school teacher in the land looks up to Vanderwater as the Dean of
American criticism. Yet I read his stuff, and it seems to me the perfection of
the felicitous expression of the inane. Why, he is no more than a ponderous
bromide, thanks to Gelett Burgess. And Praps is no better. His Hemlock Mosses,
for instance, is beautifully written. Not a comma is out of place; and the tone
- ah! - is lofty, so lofty. He is the best-paid critic in the United States.
Though, Heaven forbid! he's not a critic at all. They do criticism better in
England.
    But the point is, they sound the popular note, and they sound it so
