But Clavering had made a violent rebound. He threw himself into a chair and lit a cigarette, smiling at her indulgently. "The trouble with you, Gora," he said, "is that you are—and probably always were—artist first and woman last. If you'd got the man you thought you wanted you'd have chucked him in about six months. But I happen to be a man first and artist next."
Miss Dwight shrugged her shoulders. "Will you deny that you have been completely happy while writing that play? So happy and absorbed that you forgot everything else on earth—and everybody?"
"That's true enough. But if it's a mere question of happiness, that's not the sort that lasts, and the reaction is frightful. I am beginning to feel a hideous sense of loss and wish I had it to do all over again."
"You can go to work on another."
"I'll never feel to another play as I have to this."
"That's what every artist has said to himself since the gods plucked out a rib and invented the breed. Even if you do your comedy next your submergence will be precisely the same. It's the creative pot boiling that does the business."
"I don't believe it."
"Well, don't, then. And don't wake up as blue as paint tomorrow morning. Reaction is the price we all have to pay for keeping the brain too long at a pitch so high above the normal. It's the downwash of blood from the organ it has kept at fever heat. And it's a long sight less commonplace than reaction from too much love-making. Especially when love-making has begun to pall—which it does sooner in artists than in ordinary men.… Writers begin life all over again with each new release of the creative faculty; and each new work is as enthralling as the last. But love!" She sighed. "You don't look as if I had made the slightest impression on you."
"You haven't. A man can combine both if a woman cannot. You forget that we return here after two or three months in Austria, and here we remain for at least two years."
"Why are you so sure of that? Have you her actual promise?"