After a minute's silence Elisabeth whispered—
"When one is as divinely happy as this, isn't it difficult to realize that the earth will ever be earthy again, and the butter turnipy, and things like that? Yet they will be."
"But never quite as earthy or quite as turnipy as they were before; that's just the difference."
After playing for a few minutes with Christopher's watch-chain, Elisabeth suddenly remarked—
"You never really appreciated my pictures, Chris. You never did me justice as an artist, though you did me far more than justice as a woman. Why was that?"
"Didn't I? I'm sorry. Nevertheless, I'm not sure that you are right. I was always intensely interested in your pictures because they were yours, quite apart from their own undoubted merits."
"That was just it; you admired my pictures because they were painted by me, while you really ought to have admired me because I had painted the pictures."
A look of amusement stole over Christopher's face. "Then I fell short of your requirements, dear heart; for, as far as you and your works were concerned, I certainly never committed the sin of worshipping the creature rather than the creator."
"But there was a time when I wanted you to do so."
"As a matter of fact," said Christopher thoughtfully, "I don't believe a man who loves a woman can ever appreciate her genius properly, because love is greater than genius, and so the greater swallows up the less. In the eyes of the world, her genius is the one thing which places a woman of genius above her fellows, and the world worships it accordingly. But in the eyes of the man who loves her, she is already placed so far above her fellows that her genius makes no difference to her altitude. Thirty feet makes all the difference in the height of a weather-cock, but none at all in the distance between the earth and a fixed star."