“And he said,” she went on, “that he believed you could, if you would, be a great man. I asked him at once what reasons he had for saying that. He gave me certain points in your work: I shan’t repeat them or you will strain after them and exaggerate them. But he thought them decisive. He showed your work to other men whose opinions confirmed his own.... What now?”
“It’s wonderfully good to hear,” John said unsteadily. “Margaret, tell me the special points he hit on. I don’t see how it is possible to be sure at this stage.”
“I’ll tell you one point—too general for you to exaggerate and spoil. He said that you wrote naturally, established a curious intimacy with your audience, and that yet what you said was momentous—the rarest of combinations. And he repeated what you heard him say that night at dinner—that your images were chosen with the eyes tight shut or wide open—the full vision, inward or outward. He gave instances.”
“What instances?”
“Those I can’t tell you. If I did you would be bound to imitate them.”
He thought over this in silence. “Margaret,” he said, “may not this be mere talk? You know how great men love an occasional enthusiasm. Mr. Alter is in no way bound by what he says.”
“He acts on it, at any rate. He went to see your mother about it.”
“She wrote that he had called.”
“He has called often,” Margaret said. She smiled as she remembered his words, spoken after one of those expeditions to the country. “Mrs. Lynwood is delightful,” he had said. “She understands everything except her son. She wishes he would settle down to the Navy—a fixed income and an open-air life. She smiles at his poetry, and says, ‘Yes, I dare say it is good, Wing, and I’m glad he does it so well; but there’s no money in it. And we are dreadfully poor, you know.’”