It locked his guest a minute as in closed throbbing arms. “I could do it for one, if you were the one.”
“Don’t say that; I don’t deserve it; it scorches me,” he protested with eyes suddenly grave and glowing. “The ‘one’ is of course one’s self, one’s conscience, one’s idea, the singleness of one’s aim. I think of that pure spirit as a man thinks of a woman he has in some detested hour of his youth loved and forsaken. She haunts him with reproachful eyes, she lives for ever before him. As an artist, you know, I’ve married for money.” Paul stared and even blushed a little, confounded by this avowal; whereupon his host, observing the expression of his face, dropped a quick laugh and pursued: “You don’t follow my figure. I’m not speaking of my dear wife, who had a small fortune—which, however, was not my bribe. I fell in love with her, as many other people have done. I refer to the mercenary muse whom I led to the altar of literature. Don’t, my boy, put your nose into that yoke. The awful jade will lead you a life!”
Our hero watched him, wondering and deeply touched. “Haven’t you been happy!”
“Happy? It’s a kind of hell.”
“There are things I should like to ask you,” Paul said after a pause.
“Ask me anything in all the world. I’d turn myself inside out to save you.”
“To ‘save’ me?” he quavered.
“To make you stick to it—to make you see it through. As I said to you the other night at Summersoft, let my example be vivid to you.”
“Why your books are not so bad as that,” said Paul, fairly laughing and feeling that if ever a fellow had breathed the air of art—!
“So bad as what?”