At last Jimmie understood the whole significance of the scheme. Augusta, serene and sure in her beautiful faith, had held the breaking bridges of life for him, and, while he had been weakly content to drift down into the depths of unhoping uselessness, she had looked calmly and surely ahead and had already seen him safely across and moving up the heights beyond.
Once he had loved Augusta as a big brother adores and guards a little sister. Again, in another time, their positions had become reversed and he had loved her and leaned upon her and taken strength from her, almost as a child takes strength from a fondling mother. Now in the light of the nobler, mating partnership that he began to understand, he was conscious of another and more wonderful love.
His gun and his game slid quietly to the ground and he took her gently into his arms with a new light of adoring tenderness in his eyes.
When they came, however, to putting Augusta's plans into actual operation Jimmie had his misgivings. He knew himself. And he knew that, with all of his ready tongue and his genial effrontery in talking himself into and out of a situation, he was at bottom shy and diffident. He had never been able to do good, sincere work with anybody watching him. He had always loved to hug and hide his work until it was actually in print. He had never in his life been guilty of reading or even showing a manuscript to a friend. And he was shy now, even of Augusta's quick sympathy and understanding.
What was worse, he found that his mind was sluggish and lazy. After the months, in which he had thought only of rest and sleep and the feeding of his body, he found it almost impossible to spur his mind up to the point of nervous tension where he could create with any sequence. The fires of his brain were banked and choked with the accumulations which the greedy body was piling up for itself. He felt stupid, and yet he found that he could not even get irritated with himself over the fact.
To please Augusta, he kept on trying, for he knew how she must have set her heart on this plan of hers and he would have given everything that was in him to make it a success. Never in his life had he tried so hard and so consciously to write good lines. But the good lines would not come, even though he sat for hours dictating painfully and slowly while Augusta wrote. He knew that the work was not good, but he would say nothing, secretly hoping that she would soon tire of the drudgery and let him get at the machine, as he was now hungry to do, in his own way.
Augusta did not tire. But in the end she pronounced fatal judgment. One day in the middle of a long paragraph she dropped her hands from the keyboard and looked Jimmie squarely in the eye.
"Nothing but the truth, Jimmie," she demanded, "do I get in your way? This is not your good work."
"Had you noticed?" said Jimmie dryly.
"It is not bad," Augusta explained, springing loyally to the defence of anything that Jimmie had done. "For anybody else it would be perfectly all right. But it isn't just you, Jimmie. It's not just alive, you see. It's—It's—"