“But you’re letting this idea of yours altogether obsess you. You’ve created an imaginary child, just as you might have created one in fiction, only ten times more vividly. Then when the earthly frame into which it was to pass proves too frail to hold it you refuse to let it die. You keep on thinking: ‘My daughter! my daughter!’ And spiritually you reach out to a being that only exists in your imagination.”
“She doesn’t, Helstern; that’s where you’re wrong. I thought so at first, but now I know. She really exists, exists in that wonderful world we can only dimly conjecture. She sought for admission to this our world and it was denied her; but she lives in the spirit. She will grow up in the spirit; and, even as if she were a child of the flesh, I who loved her so well have her always.”
“Rubbish! Look here, I see what’s the matter with you. You’ve got the fictionists’ imagination. This is only a creature of your brain. Kill it, as Dickens killed little Dombey, as the female novelists kill their little Willies and little Evas. Kill it.”
“Man, would you make a parricide of me? Murder is not done with hands alone. I loved this child as never in my life have I loved any one. It’s strange—I don’t believe I ever did really love any one before. I’ve had an immense affection for people; but for Dorothy I would have died.”
“You make me tired, man. She’s not real.”
“She is—to me; and supposing for a moment that she isn’t, is it not the case that we can never care for real persons with their faults and follies as we can for our idealised abstractions? We never really love any one till we’ve lost them. But, as you say, I must rouse myself.”
“Why, of course. Granted that she really exists in the spirit, let her presence be a sweetness and an inspiration to you, not a gnawing sorrow. Buck up!”
“You’re right. I must get to my writing at once. After all I have my wife to think of. She loves me.”
“She surely does, devotedly. You have a treasure in her, and you don’t realise it.”
“I suppose not. My work takes so much of the power of feeling out of me. My emotional life is sacrificed to it. The world I create is more real to me than the world about me. I don’t think the creative artist should marry. He only makes an apology for a husband.”