"'Spent,'" he whispered, half to himself.
Her silence told him he was correct. It was the short thing, since then slightly renamed and improved, that Tressor had, of all he had written, praised superlatively. Of all he had written, but, as he looked at this, astonishment welled up in him. "But this is not what I wrote," he said.
It was a picture of dull-red angry sunset tones over a bare stony plain and a dimly-outlined ragged track. A solitary figure of a man lay there, just as he had stumbled forward and fallen at the last step. The light glowed on his sunburnt nude back, his face in shadow; and on one other object, for, some short way beyond him, was a dimly-seen ruined shrine, with the statue of a god, half overthrown. The stone effigy reeled insecurely against a broken pillar, and the glow of the dying sun caught on its upcast face. The girl had copied some Greek masterpiece, and there, in that lone waste, as if to mock the beaten human figure, a regular, perfect, immobile brow and eyes and nose and lips turned upwards to the sky. In the fallen man was life, beaten and despairing, but life; in the fallen god was death, serene and lovely, but death.
"This is not what I wrote," repeated Paul again.
"But you instantly named it."
"It alone, of the pieces in the book, fitted at all," he said.
"I suspect that was not all. I should not be in the least surprised if you had more in your mind than you knew. Anyway, your spent day struck me so."
Paul started, and looked at her almost with awe. He saw it all so plainly. He had sat down to write one evening after a dull heavy day when all the growing doubt and despair in his soul had been surging around him. He had written of a dying sun, a barren waste, a wearied walk, a lost hope; yet he had not seen this—no, no, not this.
"It was an ordinary day," said Paul.
"To you perhaps. To me it meant a life."