"No," he said. Then he added, "I've always hated your work—not because it was bad, but because it was good."
She dropped her hand from the curtain she had been about to draw aside.
"Let me see it," said he. "All that doesn't matter, now."
She brought out the portrait. He looked in silence—he had hid himself behind that impenetrable stolidity which made him seem not only emotionless but incapable of emotion. When he took his gaze from the picture, it was to stare into vacancy. She watched him with eyes shining softly and sadly. As he became vaguely conscious of the light upon the dark path and stirred, she said with irresistible gentleness, "What is it, Horace?"
"Blues—only the blues," replied he, rousing himself and rising heavily from his chair. "I must go. I'll end by making you as uncomfortable as I am myself. In the mood I'm in to-day, a man should hide in his bed and let no one come near him."
"Sit down—please," said she, touching his arm in a gesture of appeal. She smiled with a trace of her old raillery. "You are more nearly human than I've ever seen you."
He yielded to the extent of seating himself tentatively on the arm of a chair. "Human? Yes—that's it. I've sunk down to where I think I'd almost be grateful even for pity." The spell of good luck, of prosperity without reverse, that had held him a mere incarnate ambition, was broken, was dissolving.
She seated herself opposite, leaned toward him. "Horace," she said, "can I help you?" And so soothing was her tone that her offer could not have smarted upon the wound even of a proud man less humbled than he.
"It's nothing in which you could be of the slightest assistance," replied he. "I've got myself in a mess—who was ever in a mess that wasn't of his own making? I jumped in, and I find there's no jumping out. I might crawl out—but I never learned that way of traveling, and at my age it can't be learned."
"Whatever it is," she said, very slow and deliberate, "you must let me help you bear it."