This was the
dining-room, drawing-room, and general focus throughout the day, and
was called simply the Room. William had a `den' on the ground floor of
the left wing; and there, in the mornings, he used to write a great
deal. Mary had no special place of her own: her place was wherever her
duties needed her. William wrote reviews of books for the Daily --. He
did also creative work. The vein of poetry in him had worked itself
out--or rather, it expressed itself for him in Mary. For technical
purposes, the influence of Ibsen had superseded that of Morris. At the
time of my first visit, he was writing an extraordinarily gloomy play
about an extraordinarily unhappy marriage. In subsequent seasons
(Ibsen's disc having been somehow eclipsed for him by George
Gissing's) he was usually writing novels in which every one--or do I
exaggerate?--had made a disastrous match. I think Mary's belief in his
genius had made him less diffident than he was at Oxford. He was
always emerging from his den, with fresh pages of MS., into the Room.
`You don't mind?' he would say, waving his pages, and then would shout
`Mary!' She was always promptly forthcoming--sometimes from the
direction of the kitchen, in a white apron, sometimes from the garden,
in a blue one. She never looked at him while he read.
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