“But you are going on—you are!”
He took her head in his hands, as she sat there close to him, and said:
“If you could only make me believe that, child—if you could even fool me into believing that—you might get hold of me. You see, that’s what you’re up against. There’s nothing to get to. Oh, the rest doesn’t count! I’ve had notoriety, what some people call fame. Do you think it means anything to me to paint what I have been painting, do it over again and again?” He shook his head. “It’s not the knocks that’s the trouble. No; I’ll be honest. If this—this thing that’s ended had come ten years—five years ago, it might have done me good.”
She nodded her head eagerly.
“It will now—I know it!”
“No; not now. It wasn’t what others did to me; it was what I did to myself. Five years ago, I should have run away; I should have been cruel. I didn’t. I was a sentimentalist. I didn’t want to do another harm. I stayed and sacrificed the other thing—the thing that can’t be shared. I made my choice then; now it is too late.”
“But why? You can work now as you want.”
“Yes; but the power to dream isn’t there, and that’s the whole of it. And that doesn’t come—it just doesn’t seem to come,” he said nervously, his hands twisting, and a blank look coming across his eyes.
She understood now the depth of the task before her, as she understood, too, how much he wanted to disbelieve the things he announced. And there rose before her clearly that the only way to reclaim him was to put a purpose into his aimless life.
“Mr. Dan,” she said softly.