"Yes," said Smith, "I presume it is. Certainly it is for the genius; probably even for any man of high and true talent, a man able to lose himself in his own creation. Undoubtedly that is the only real elixir of life, the only ineffable exaltation. But isn't that carrying your argument out too far? We can scarcely set a standard for creative geniuses—there are too few of them. You spoke of the men who create their own ideas. How many of them are there? There are thousands of near-authors, near-musicians, near-artists, near-poets, who are painfully remote from the genuine article. Do you understand what I mean?"
"Oh, yes. And that is so. I myself have at least seen that."
"Of course it is so. And do you suppose these second-rate creators get the real thrill? Not they. In their hearts they know they are frauds, impostors, dilettantes at best. There is no vitality to their grip on things, and they know it. They deal with the spurious and fustian from cradle to grave. Why, I myself know innumerable people that spend their lives in trying to persuade themselves into thinking they are doing something worth while!"
Mentally the girl winced; the words went home so close to Pelgram, who had been in her own mind. It was this very feeling of protest, for which Smith now found voice, that had sickened her of Pelgram.
"Such people get little out of life," the underwriter went on, "probably first because they are constantly uneasy in the knowledge that they are charlatans, and second because they do not have anything real, anything alive, to face. They deal in half-tones, in nuances—"
Nuances! Was the man clairvoyant? He had suggested that an underwriter ought to be. Helen felt that this channel had been pursued far enough.
"No one defends dilettanteism as such," she said.
"One can, though, easily enough, if one wishes," Smith promptly responded. "After all, to do things for the love of doing them is the right way. But they must be the right things, and to get the full taste out of anything one must have faced real dragons to attain it. There is no lack of dragons in the insurance business. You're fighting them all the time. If it isn't against time to keep your premiums up, it's against fate to keep your losses down. And of course all your days you're fighting on not one but a thousand battle lines to keep your rivals from getting your business away from you. Now your little artist, your semi-creator, hasn't anything like that. So long as he lives he hasn't any real facts to face."
"No; I suppose not," said the girl, slowly.
"The same trouble, or very nearly the same, exists for your soldier of fortune. To be sure, he faces facts—there can be no doubt about that—but they are facts he deliberately seeks, and not the actual obstacles that the world rolls up before him. He gets color and excitement all right, but the quality of the self-constructed excitement isn't quite so fine; in fact, after a while it begins to pall on one. Then, too, a man wearies of doing things that serve no useful end and that get nowhere; he begins to feel awkward and superfluous in the whole scheme of things. And these soldiers of fortune don't really do anything, they merely put on the canvas a few bold strokes that attract ephemeral attention but which their successors promptly paint out, and they leave the world precisely where it was before they entered it or carried on their living."