The Coast of Bohemia by William Dean Howells

Cornelia and Ludlow were married at Pymantoning in the latter part of June, and he spent the summer there, working at a picture which he was going to exhibit in the fall. At the same time he worked at a good many other pictures, and he helped Cornelia with the things she was trying. He painted passages and incidents in her pictures, sometimes illustratively, and sometimes for the pleasure of having their lives blended in their work, and he tried to see how nearly he could lose his work in hers. He pretended that he learned more than he taught in the process, and that he felt in her efforts a determining force, a clear sense of what she wanted to do, that gave positive form and direction to what was vague and speculative in himself. He was strenuous that she should not, in the slightest degree, lapse from her ideal and purpose, or should cease to be an artist in becoming a wife. He contended that there was no real need of that, and though it had happened in most of the many cases where artists had married artists, he held that it had happened through the man's selfishness and thoughtlessness, and not through the conditions. He was resolved that Cornelia should not lose faith in herself from want of his appreciation, or from her own over-valuation of his greater skill and school; and he could prove to any one who listened that she had the rarer gift. He did not persuade her, with all his reasons, but her mother faithfully believed him. It had never seemed surprising to her that Cornelia should win a man like Ludlow; she saw no reason why Cornelia should not; and she could readily accept the notion of Cornelia's superiority when he advanced it. She was not arrogant about it; she was simply and entirely satisfied; and she was every moment so content with Cornelia's husband that Cornelia herself had to be a little critical of him in self-defence.

She called him a dreamer and theorist; she ran him down to the Burtons, and said he would never come to anything, because artists who talked well never painted so well. She allowed that he talked divinely, and it would not have been safe for Mrs. Burton to agree with her otherwise; but Mrs. Burton was far too wise a woman to do so. She did not, perhaps, ride so high a horse as Mrs. Saunders in her praises of Ludlow, but it would have been as impossible to unseat her. She regarded herself as somehow the architect of Cornelia's happiness in having discovered Ludlow and believed in him long before Cornelia met him, and she could easily see that if he had not come out to visit Burton, that first time, they would never have met at all. Mrs. Saunders could joyfully admit this without in the least relinquishing her own belief, so inarticulate that it was merely part of her personal consciousness, that this happiness was of as remote an origin as the foundations of the world. She could see, now, that nothing else could have been intended from the beginning, but she did not fail at the same time to credit herself with forethought and wisdom in bracing Cornelia against the overtures of Dickerson when he reappeared in her life. Burton, of course, advanced no claim to recognition in the affair. He enjoyed every moment of Ludlow's stay in Pymantoning, and gave his work a great deal of humorous attention and gratuitous criticism, especially the picture he was chiefly engaged upon.