“Come to one, indeed! I had to go out and look for it. What do you think?”
“I call it success. Tell me how you got it.”
They returned to the Park, and Dick delivered himself of the saga of his own doings, with all the arrogance of a young man speaking to a woman.
From the beginning he told the tale, the I—I—I’s flashing through the records as telegraph-poles fly past the traveller. Maisie listened and nodded her head. The histories of strife and privation did not move her a hair’s-breadth. At the end of each canto he would conclude, “And that gave me some notion of handling colour,” or light, or whatever it might be that he had set out to pursue and understand. He led her breathless across half the world, speaking as he had never spoken in his life before.
And in the flood-tide of his exaltation there came upon him a great desire to pick up this maiden who nodded her head and said, “I understand. Go on,”—to pick her up and carry her away with him, because she was Maisie, and because she understood, and because she was his right, and a woman to be desired above all women.
Then he checked himself abruptly. “And so I took all I wanted,” he said, “and I had to fight for it. Now you tell.”
Maisie’s tale was almost as gray as her dress. It covered years of patient toil backed by savage pride that would not be broken though dealers laughed, and fogs delayed work, and Kami was unkind and even sarcastic, and girls in other studios were painfully polite. It had a few bright spots, in pictures accepted at provincial exhibitions, but it wound up with the oft repeated wail, “And so you see, Dick, I had no success, though I worked so hard.”
Then pity filled Dick. Even thus had Maisie spoken when she could not hit the breakwater, half an hour before she had kissed him. And that had happened yesterday.
“Never mind,” he said. “I’ll tell you something, if you’ll believe it.” The words were shaping themselves of their own accord. “The whole thing, lock, stock, and barrel, isn’t worth one big yellow sea-poppy below Fort Keeling.”
Maisie flushed a little. “It’s all very well for you to talk, but you’ve had the success and I haven’t.”