"Yes, I feel sure I do. Somehow, I know that secretly and in your own heart you are in full tide of sympathy with me and with my life's work."
"I thought you had no imagination," she said.
"I haven't. Do you mean that I only imagine that you are in sympathy with me?"
"No," she said. "I am."
After a few moments she laughed deliciously. He never knew why. Nor was she ever perfectly sure why she had laughed, though they discussed the matter very gravely.
A new youth seemed to have invaded her, an exquisite sense of lightness, of power. Vaguely she was conscious of ability, of a wonderful and undreamed of capacity. Within her heart she seemed[138] to feel the subtle stir of a new courage, a certainty of the future, of indefinable but splendid things.
The manuscript of the novel which she had sent North two weeks ago seemed to her a winged thing soaring to certain victory in the empyrean. Suddenly, by some magic, doubt, fear, distress, were allayed—and it was like surcease from a steady pain, with all the blessed and heavenly languor relaxing her mind and body.
And all the while Brown talked on.
Lying there in her chair she listened to him while the thoughts in her eased mind moved in delicate accompaniment.
Somehow she understood that never in her life had she been so happy—with this boy babbling beside her, and her own thoughts responding almost tenderly to his youth, his inconsistencies, to the arrogance typical of his sex. He was so wrong!—so far from the track, so utterly astray, so pitiably confident! Who but she should know, who had worked and studied and failed and searched, always writing, however—which is the only way in the world to learn how to write—or to learn that there is no use in writing.