"Friends?" said Lewis. "Have you been writing to her?"
"Oh, no," said H lne. "Women don't have to know each other to be friends."
"Why, there's nothing more to tell about Natalie," said Lewis.
H lne looked him squarely in the eyes.
"Tell me honestly," she said; "haven't you wanted to go back to
Natalie?"
Lewis flushed. He rose and picked up his hat and stick.
"'You can give a new hat to a king, but it isn't everybody that will take your cast-off clothes,' That's one of dad's, of course."
CHAPTER LII
Through that winter Lewis worked steadily forward to a goal that he knew his father could not cavil at. He knew it instinctively. His grasp steadied to expression with repression, or, as one of his envious, but honest, competitors put it, genius had bowed to sanity.
It is usual to credit these rebirths in individual art to some great grief, but no great grief had come to Lewis. His work fulfilled its promise in just such measure as he had fulfilled himself. In as much as he had matured, in so much had his art. Man is not ripened by a shock, but by those elements that develop him to the point of feeling and knowing the shock when it comes to him. In a drab world, drab would have been Lewis's end; but, little as he realized it, his world had not been drab.