“I believe all but the last.”
“Well, that’s the way I feel now,” he admitted. “I suppose I should stay away. It’s only vanity.”
“No; you want to feel your strength,” she said slowly. “What you get from others will give you confidence.”
“Yes; I suppose I’m like the rest,” he said frankly. “There is something cruel about it. I want to go back and feel how I’ve gone ahead of the others—even my friends, my best friends. It’s something savage, almost as though you flung them down bodily and climbed over them. And they’ll feel that, too, no matter how much they praise what I’ve done—at the bottom in their secret hearts it’ll hurt. Wonder why it must be so!”
“I don’t know,” she said thoughtfully; “if you feel that way, it’s because you need just that feeling, I suppose.”
He hesitated, rather surprised at her understanding before he went on.
“I know it’s trivial, guess the big ones are beyond that—if they are; and yet—” He brought his hands together in an eager clasp over his knee, and his face lit up. “And yet it would be something to go back and feel how you’ve astonished them all, to make good, to have everyone talking about you again—the feeling of the footlights. If you’ve once known that, it’s hard to get away from it.” He smiled at himself. “What an ass I am! Do you think I’m hopelessly ridiculous?” She was standing, her back to a tree. As he looked up guiltily, she was smiling down at him, with a proprietary, maternal pride. “Inga,” he said grinning, “sometimes you remind me of a mother cat, purring away contentedly and watching her favorite kitten tumbling about the rug.”
She burst out laughing.
“Perhaps!”
He took her hand and said abruptly: