“You have the big thing in you!” she said insistently. “I knew it from the first moment.”
He shook his head again.
“No; there are some who think I had—but I know better, I know—I know!” he said, with a rising emphasis. “That’s the terrible time in the life of an artist, when he realizes he can go so far—and no farther. That’s when he pays for all the triumphs others envy.”
“I won’t have it so,” she said, with such a note of fury in her voice that it stopped him, and he looked at her eagerly, as though longing to be convinced. She was on the arm of his chair, leaning toward him, serious and wilful. Their glances met, and then gradually the seriousness of her look melted into a smile—a flash of white teeth and the slender oval face suffused with a light that seemed to envelop and warm him. He forgot what he had been saying, watching her, the craving for beauty in his soul fed by the tenderness and the youth of her eyes. He laid his hand over hers and stared into her face with that wondering, baffled look of his. Then his mind slipped away to the novelty of the orderly, harmonious room.
“You have made a spot for dreams here,” he said, at length.
“I have only just begun,” she said confidently.
“Don’t!” he said, in a low voice, understanding her. “It’s not fair to you; it cannot be done.”
She smiled again, a smile that seemed to draw him up into her arms like a tired child, and laid her hand gently over his forehead.
“We shall see.”
“Good heavens! Haven’t you anything better to do in life,” he said, all at once, “than to believe in derelicts?”