"I could not live long away from it. But the people! And I love the birds and the animals, and—oh!"—her voice rose excitedly—"don't kill it!"
A wasp was humming dangerously about Paul's head, and although his love of all things that had life was as strong as Flamby's, the self-protective instinct had led him to endeavour to knock the wasp away. Now, Flamby extending one motionless hand, the gaudily-striped insect alighted upon her finger and began busily to march from thence to the rosy tip of the next, and so on until it reached Flamby's little curved thumb. Holding the thumb upright, so that the wasp stood upon a miniature tower, she pursed her lips entrancingly and blew the insect upon its way as gently as if borne upon a summer zephyr.
"They only sting if you hurt them," she explained; "and so would you!"
"But," said Paul, who had watched the incident wonderingly, "if all insects were permitted to live unmolested, and all animals for that matter, the world would become uninhabitable for man."
"I know," replied Flamby pensively—"and I cannot understand why nature is so cruel."
Paul studied the piquant, sun-kissed face with a new interest. "Flamby," he said earnestly, "one day you will be a great artist."
She looked into his eyes, but only for a moment, turned and fled. There were a hundred things he had wanted to say to her, a hundred questions he had wanted to ask. But off she ran along the margin of the wood, and where a giant elm stood, a forest outpost at a salient, paused and waved her hand to him.
VII
For all the exquisite sympathy of his nature and intuitive understanding of others, there was a certain trait in the character of Paul Mario not infrequently found in men of genius. From vanity he was delightfully free, nor had adulation spoiled him; but his interest in the world was strangely abstract, and his outlook almost cosmic. He dreamed of building a ladder of stars for all earth-bound humanity, and thought not in units, but in multitudes. Picturesque distress excited his emotions keenly, and sometimes formed ineffaceable memories, but memories oddly impersonal, little more than appreciations of sorrow as a factor in that mystic equation to the solving of which he had bent all his intellect.
On the other hand he was fired by a passionate desire to aid; nor when occasion had arisen had he hesitated to sacrifice self for another's good. But such altruism was born of impulse and never considered. The spectacle of the universe absorbed him, and listening for the Pythagorean music of the spheres he sometimes became deaf to the voices of those puny lives about him. His attention being called to them, however, his solicitude was sweet and sincere, but once removed from his purview they were also dismissed from his mind; and because of his irresistible charm there were some who wept to be so soon forgotten. His intellect was patrician—almost deiform in the old Roman sense. Probably all great masters have been similarly endowed, for if in order that one shall successfully conduct a military campaign he must think in armies and not in squads, so, if another would aspire to guide Thought, presumably must he think in continents. It does not follow that he shall lack genius for love and friendship, but merely that he cannot distract his mind in seeking out individual sorrows. The physician tends the hurts of the body, the priest ministers to the ills of the spirit; Paul Mario yearned to heal the wounds of a stricken world.