"Not always. Just often enough to scare me to death when the biggest need of my life seems just out of reach."
"Nonsense, Lawrence," she laughed. "When you were sick you talked as if you could reach out and pull down the stars, if you needed them in an endeavor to complete your life."
"Sometimes I think I could, then the reality of life comes crashing through the walls of my dream-palace, and, behold, I am standing desolate and abandoned, grasping at lights which are even too far away to be seen! I am clawing darkness for something I fancied I could reach, while, as far as I am concerned, it is clear out of space and time."
She sat pensively looking across the lake.
"Yet you keep on reaching, don't you?"
"Yes—and no. I always wish I could. There are times, Claire, when I don't want to be a realist, don't want to face life as it is, when it seems too tawdry to be valuable just as it is; then I reach out into the night and cry, 'Let me be the maddest of dreamers, the wildest of idealists, a knight of fancy seeking the illusive dream!'"
Claire laughed aloud as she said, "And don't you know, dear man, that that is just what you do become at times?"
"I know it. That's the joke of it. All the while I mock myself for being a romancing idiot!"
"What a state of mind!" she exclaimed.
"It isn't pleasant. Then, worse than that, when I attain my star, I spoil it with too much scrutiny."