The glory of the morning passed from him as suddenly as it had come, and he told himself with the uncompromising desperation of youth that for all he cared now his great play might remain forever in oblivion. Life itself appeared as empty—as futile as his ambition—so empty, indeed, that he began immediately in the elastic melancholy which comes easily at twenty-five—to plan the consoling details of an early death. When he remembered his buoyant happiness of a few hours ago it seemed to him almost ridiculous, and he experienced a curious sensation of detachment, of having drifted out of his proper and peculiar place in life. "I shall never be happy again and I am no longer the same person that I was yesterday—or even a half hour ago," he thought with a determination to be completely miserable. Yet even while the words were in his mind he found himself weighing almost instinctively the literary value of his new emotion, and to his horror the situation in which he now stood began slowly to take a dramatic form in his mental vision. The very attitude into which he had unconsciously fallen—as he paused with his face averted and his hand tightening with violence upon a book he had picked up—showed to his imagination as a bit of restrained emotional acting beyond the footlights.
"Then there's nothing I can do but go straight to the devil," he declared with resolution, and at the same instant he found to his supreme self-contempt that he was wondering how the speech would sound in the mouth of an actor in his drama.
"Or write another play," suggested Laura, while he started quickly and turned toward the door.
"I'll never write another," he said in a voice of gloom, which he tried with all his soul to make an honest expression of his state of mind. "I wish now I hadn't written this one. I wouldn't if I'd known."
"Then it's just as well that you didn't," she returned with a positive motherly assurance. "My poor dear boy," she added soothingly, "you are not the first man of twenty-five who has mistaken the literary mania for the passion of love, and I fear that you will not be the last. There seems, curiously enough, to be a strange resemblance between the two emotions. If you'd only look at me plainly without any of your lovely glamour you'll see in a minute what nonsense it all is. Why, you are all the time in your heart of hearts in love with some little blonde thing with pink cheeks who is still at school."
He turned away in a passion of wounded pride; then coming back again he stood looking moodily down upon her.
"I'll prove to you if it kills me that I've spoken the truth," he declared, and it seemed to him that the words were not really what he meant to say—that they came from him against his will because he had fitted them into the mouth of an imaginary character.
"Oh, please don't," she begged.
"I suppose I may still see you sometimes?" he enquired.
"Oh, dear, yes; whenever you like."