“You have had more than any other woman!” he had exclaimed to her one day; and her smile flashed a derisive light on his blunder. Fool that he was, not to have seen that she had not had enough! That she was young still—do years count?—tender, human, a woman; that the living have need of the living.
After that, when they climbed the alleys of the hanging park, resting in one of the little ruined temples, or watching, through a ripple of foliage, the remote blue flash of the lake, they did not always talk of Rendle or of literature. She encouraged Danyers to speak of himself; to confide his ambitions to her; she asked him the questions which are the wise woman’s substitute for advice.
“You must write,” she said, administering the most exquisite flattery that human lips could give.
Of course he meant to write—why not to do something great in his turn? His best, at least; with the resolve, at the outset, that his best should be the best. Nothing less seemed possible with that mandate in his ears. How she had divined him; lifted and disentangled his groping ambitions; laid the awakening touch on his spirit with her creative Let there be light!
It was his last day with her, and he was feeling very hopeless and happy.
“You ought to write a book about him,” she went on gently.
Danyers started; he was beginning to dislike Rendle’s way of walking in unannounced.
“You ought to do it,” she insisted. “A complete interpretation—a summing-up of his style, his purpose, his theory of life and art. No one else could do it as well.”
He sat looking at her perplexedly. Suddenly—dared he guess?
“I couldn’t do it without you,” he faltered.