She started. "What do you mean?"
"Just that. I make a mess of it."
"Still I don't understand."
He thought for a moment, then said sadly: "Take the cherub I carved there"—he nodded in the direction of the house—"I was wild with creative fervor when I did that. I put into it a thousand little thoughts that flashed with imaginative fire. I dreamed things, felt things that should have made a masterpiece beyond all masterpieces, and at last the thing was finished. Still under the heat of enthusiasm, I felt of it, tested it, and found it good. Well, a week later, when the imaginative flame was gone, I went back and looked at it again. It was poor, cold, imperfect, not at all what it should have been. I dreamed a star and made a block of poor wooden imagery."
"But you underestimate your work. To me the cherub is still a star."
He laughed. "It is what others see of good in my work that makes me hope that sooner or later I will do the thing that will stand eternally a star of the first magnitude."
"And you will, Lawrence," she said earnestly.
"Perhaps." He was pensive. "Perhaps not. That is where the rest of life enters in. I want many things; they seem necessary if I am to attain my eternal star. I am afraid I shall never get them!"
"Have you tried?"
"No, I haven't the courage. If they should be beyond my grasp, if obtaining them, they should prove to be wrong and not the real things I need, after all, what then?"