“I don’t think your hands are homely. I’ve watched your hands ever since we met. I think they’re the strongest, most virile hands I’ve ever seen upon a man. If I were in deep trouble, unable to protect myself, I should very much like to have hands like yours clenched into pile-driver fists, striking blows in my behalf! That for Bernie! She’s absolutely heartless and a little vulgarian herself, beside. I think she’s horrid. Oh, you poor boy! You haven’t mentioned a single girl or woman who’s come into your life or gone out of it who’s been anything but a heartache and a handicap. Hasn’t there been one, Nathan—not one?” It was the first time she had called him Nathan. But it was spoken too naturally to be crude or forward.
“I’ve told you the whole story,” said the man simply, thickly.
He put out his hand in a gesture, that old, old habitual groping motion, as though feeling for some one or something by his side. But now, for the first time in his life, that hand did not grope fruitlessly. It grasped a woman’s hand, soft, strong, human, electric in that contact!
“I beg your pardon,” he cried, startled.
“There’s no need for begging my pardon, dear boy. Somehow I feel you and I are going to be rather good friends. Some other night I’ll return your confidence by telling you my story. But to-night belongs to you.” She waited a moment and asked:
“And you never did any more with your talent for writing after your father stopped you?”
“I couldn’t. I never had the heart. Mr. Hod, editor of the local paper, hurt my feelings one night by telling me he couldn’t print any more of my rhymes until I’d stopped a certain wail and—and—well—he said I ought to sing! But I couldn’t sing. There was no song in my heart. I gave up the poetry nonsense for good.”
“No! Not for good. You will write again, finer things. You will learn to sing. I feel certain of it; you will learn to sing!”
Nathan laid his pipe aside and sat with his big talon claws at his right temple to hide the emotions playing over his face. As he seemed disposed to silence, Madelaine continued:
“It’s almost too much to understand, dear boy—how you’ve stood out true to yourself and your ideals against such a background. Most boys would have succumbed. But you kept the faith with yourself. That was glorious. Such a constancy makes me want to sing. There are so few who keep the faith and go on, plow on—fight on!—through everything!”