"I've been filled up with conceit of myself," she went on, "and I got punished for it."
"There was never a woman living with less!" I cried, so sodden in my affection for her that I could not stand to hear her blamed, even by herself.
"Maybe I didn't show it," she said with a smile, "but I've always held, 'in to mysel',' that the gifted folk were God's aristocrats, and the day I told Danvers Carmichael and you my esteem of lords and titles and forbears I said just what I thought, though both of you laughed at me, for I reasoned that any one whom the Almighty took such special pains with must have the grand character as well. And so I made of all the people who write and paint and sing a great assembly, like Arthur's knights, who were over the earth righting wrongs and helping the weak. Then came the Burns book; and there are no words to tell the glory of it to me. All the great thoughts I had dreamed were written there, and before the power of this man, who took the commonest things of life and wrote them out in letters of gold, I felt as one might before the gods. It was of Burns I thought in my waking hours, and 'twas of him I dreamed by night; and I thanked God to be born in his country and his time, so that I might see one, from the people, who had, in its highest essence, the thing we call genius.
"But always, always," she interrupted, smiling, "with the conceit of myself which I mentioned before. Because God had given me a little gift, I believed that I was in some degree a chosen creature, a bit like the Burns man himself.
"The first time I talked with him at the inn I felt his power, his charm; but there was something in his ways to which I had never been accustomed in men—a certain freedom, which I put by, however, as one of the peculiarities of his gift.
"Well," she said, coming over and burying her face in my breast, "it took me but two weeks to discover that the thing we call genius has no more to do with a person's character than the chair he sits in; that a man can write like a god and live like the beasts in the fields. Can speak of Christian charity like the disciples of old, and hold the next person who offends him up to the ridicule of the whole parish! That he can write lines surpassing—aye!" she cried, "surpassing Polonius's advice to his son, and leave them uncopied on an ale-house table to go off with the first loose woman who comes by, and be carried home, too drunk to walk, the next morning, roaring out hymns about eternal salvation.
"And after I met the Armour girl, and found the harm that Burns had brought to her, my idol fell from its clay feet, and I was alone in a strange country, with my gods gone, and my beliefs in shreds around me.
"But I have made my readjustments. I am humbled. I see how little value verse-making holds to the real task of living, and I am a better woman for what I have been through. I have learned—almost losing my mind over the lesson," she interjected, with her own bright smile—"the value of the solid virtues of life; and I've come to the conclusion that it is harder to be a gentleman than a genius. God makes one, but a man has the handling of the other upon himself. Danvers Carmichael," she continued, looking up at me, "is a gentleman. His word is his bond. He considers others, respects woman and honors her; controls his nature, and has a code of conduct which he would rather die than break. Ah!" she said, "I have had a bitter time; but it's taught me to appreciate that in the real things of life—the things for which we are here, love, home, and the rearing of children—genius has about as much part as the royal Bengal tiger. It's beautiful to look at, but dangerous to trifle with, and,"—here she smiled at her own earnestness for a second as she started up the stairs—"and here endeth the first lesson, my Lord of Stair!"
I was in no way sorry as to her conclusions about the value of verse-making, for I had seen that her continual mental excitement was sapping her vitality; and I closed my eyes to sleep that night with a feeling of gratitude to my Heavenly Father that the Burns business was by with forever.