She then described to him her youthful longing, which the consumptive master had awakened in her, the longing which had continued to smoulder amidst the ashes of her life's experience.
"In your place I should have tramped there as a barefooted pilgrim," he said.
"Oh, but I've had money enough to go often. I could have afforded it perfectly well. Once I was as far on the road as Bozen. But I had to turn back as a punishment because a young man made eyes at me."
"How sad!" he said, laughing. "That was hard lines on you, harder than you have any conception of."
"I have some conception," she sighed. "I have only got to look at you to be convinced of how hard it was."
"Why me?"
"Because you shine like Moses after he had looked on the glory of the Lord."
He became serious at once. "There are glories here, too, if we have eyes to see them," he said. "But, nevertheless, you are right. I am so chock-full of the life and reflected radiance that I have stored up there, so many sources have been opened out, so many seeds have germinated, that I scarcely know how to use all my vast wealth, I write till my fingers bleed, and there is always more to write.... I want to give, give, and go on giving; but to whom I don't know."
"To me!" she implored, holding out her hands, palms upwards. "To me! I am so desperately poor. Such a beggar!"
With the stern eyes of a visionary he gazed down on her. "You are not poor," he said. "You have merely been allowed to starve."