He thinks at first they are his own writings--
things begun and discarded, reserved by her with fondness. She
thought so much of him, the good soul! Really, she could not have
been so dull as he had deemed her. The power to appreciate rightly-
-this, at least, she must have possessed. He unties the ribbon.
No, the writing is her own, corrected, altered, underlined. He
opens a second, a third. Then with a smile he sits down to read.
What can they be like, these poems, these stories? He laughs,
smoothing the crumpled paper, foreseeing the trite commonness, the
shallow sentiment. The poor child! So she likewise would have been
a litterateure. Even she had her ambition, her dream.
"The sunshine climbs the wall behind him, creeps stealthily across
the ceiling of the room, slips out softly by the window, leaving him
alone. All these years he had been living with a fellow poet. They
should have been comrades, and they had never spoken. Why had she
hidden herself? Why had she left him, never revealing herself?
Years ago, when they were first married--he remembers now--she had
slipped little blue-bound copy-books into his pocket, laughing,
blushing, asking him to read them.
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