It was lucky for Jimmie that he was unaware of the passionate tribute the light words implied. She gave him no time to answer, but carried him straight to the pictures.
“I had no idea you did such beautiful work,” she said, looking around her.
Jimmie followed her glance, and the melancholy of the artist laid its touch for a moment upon him. He sighed.
“They might have been beautiful if I had done what I started out to do. It is the eternal tragedy of the clipped wings.”
She was oddly responsive to a vibration in his voice, and gave out, like a passive violin, the harmonic of the struck note.
“Better to have wings that are clipped than to have no wings at all.”
She had never uttered such a sentiment, never thought such a thought in her life before. Her words sounded unreal in her own ears, and yet she had a profound sense of their sincerity.
“There is no apteryx among human souls,” said Jimmie, released from the melancholy fingers. They argued the point in a lighter vein, discussed individual pictures. Charmed by her sympathy, he spoke freely of his work, his motives, his past dreams. Had Norma not begun to know him, she might have wondered at the lack of bitterness in his talk. To this man of many struggles and many crushing disappointments the world was still young and sweet, and his faith in the ultimate righteousness of things undimmed. The simple courage of his attitude towards life moved her admiration. She felt somewhat humbled in the presence of a spirit stronger, clearer than any into which chance had hitherto afforded her a glimpse. And as he talked in his bright, half-earnest, half-humourous way, it crossed her mind that there was a fair world of thought and emotion in which she and her like had not set their feet; not the world entirely of poetic and artistic imaginings, but one where inner things mattered more than outer circumstance, where it would not be ridiculous or affected to think of the existence of a soul and its needs and their true fulfilment.
Hitherto meeting him as an alien in her world, she had regarded him with a touch of patronising pity. From this she was now free. She saw him for the first time in harmony with his environment, as the artist sensitive and responsive, integral with the beautiful creations that hung around the walls, and still homely and simple, bearing the rubs of time as bravely and frankly as the old drawing-room suite that furnished the unpretentious studio. Now it was she who felt herself somewhat disconcertingly out of her element. The sensation, however, had a curious charm.
There was one picture that had attracted her from the first. She stood in front of it moved by its pity and tenderness.