"I am afraid not. But it is such a comfort to have you back. I heard you were engaged—to an Englishman, or something?"
Tiny blushed. She was on her way to a tea, and looked exquisitely pretty in a fawn-coloured crêpe de chine embroidered with wild roses, and a bonnet of pink tulle crushed about her face. Magdaléna wondered why some man had not married her out of hand, then reflected that Tiny was likely to dispose of her own future.
"I'm not quite sure," said Miss Montgomery, looking innocently at a lithograph of the Virgin which still decorated the wall. "You see, he has a title, and it's so commonplace to marry a title. But if I decide to, I'll let you know the very first."
Shortly after she went away—and left Magdaléna alone with Henry James.
She took up one of the volumes. As she did so, something stirred in the cellars of her mind—beat its stiff wings against the narrow walls—struggled forward and upward.
She stood on the porch in the late evening: alone in a fog. Her young mind opened to literary desire—preceding it was a swift disturbing presentiment; it had recurred once, and again—but not for several years. What did it mean, here again? And what had Henry James to do with it? She dropped into a chair. Her hands trembled as they opened the book.
XXX
It was a week before she squarely faced the relation of Henry James to her own ambitions. Then she admitted it in so many words: she could not write, she never could write. The writers who were dust had inspired her to emulation; it took a great contemporary to bring her despair. It is only the living enemies we fear; the dead and their past are beautiful unrealities to the smarting ego.
Magdaléna realised for the first time the exact value she had placed upon the art of expression,—a value that was in inverse ratio to her limitations. Literature to her was, above all else, the art of words. Stories were to be picked up anywhere: had she not found a number ready to her hand? The creative faculty might, in its unique development, be something supremer still, although crippled without the perfected medium of this writer, who seemed above all writers to be the master and not the servant of words. She re-read her own efforts. They represented the hard thought and work of six years; not a great span, perhaps, but long enough to determine the promise of a faculty. The stories were wooden. Her work would always be wooden. There was not a phrase to delight the cultivated reader, not a line that any moderately clever person, given the same material, might not have written. After as many more years of labour she might become a praiseworthy writer of the third rank. She put her manuscripts in the fire.