He was speaking absently, and Elizabeth looked at him. He was glancing down at the magazine again, which was lying open on the table. She went straight to the point. "Stuart, you don't like my little verses."
He started. "Why, I—what makes you think so? I think they are beautiful—full of light and music and"—he paused.
"You looked disappointed when you finished," she persisted.
He was silent. "What was the reason?"
"I—I was looking for something I couldn't find," he said hesitatingly.
"What?"
"Its soul."
"Its soul?—'the light that never was on land or sea.' You are too exacting. Only real poets do things like that. I'm not a genius."
"You don't need to be. But one must live a real life to write real things," he said bluntly.
"And I don't," she said half-defiantly. She looked at him wonderingly, at his broad shoulders and his grave face, feeling as though this was the first time she had seen him. He seemed suddenly to be entirely unlike the old Charles Stuart who had always been merely a sort of appendage to John—a second John in fact, only not one-half so dear. It came to her like a revelation that he was not at all the old Charles Stuart, but somebody new and strange; and he was sitting in judgment upon her useless way of living! She picked up the Dominion and at a glance she saw the verses as he saw them. He was right—they were shallow, pretty little things, nothing more. Her lip quivered.