en in the dumps--out of the belief
that a fixed position was waiting for you in the stellar firmament. To
vary the metaphor, you've always been in the crack regiment, even when
the regiment was composed of cub reporters. . . . And you'd find
yourself shrinking--shrinking--nothing but a famous woman's
husband--lover, would be perhaps more like it----"

Here Clavering swore and started down the room again. That interview
in the library two weeks ago tonight came back to him. He had banished
its memory and she had been feminine and exquisite, and _young_, ever
since. But that sudden vision of her standing by the table as he had
rushed to her succor, calm and contemptuous in her indomitable powers,
weakened his muscles and he walked unsteadily.

Miss Dwight went on calmly. "For she's going to be a very famous
woman, make no doubt about that. It's quite on the cards that she may
have a niche in history. You might be useful to her in many ways, with
that brain of yours, but it was given to you for another purpose, and
you'd end by leaving her. You'd come home like a sick dog to its
kennel--and become a hack. Your genius would have shrivelled to the
roots. If you give her up now your very unhappiness and baffled
longings will make you do greater and greater things. Talent needs the
pleasant pastures of content to browse on but they sicken genius. If
you married her you wouldn't even have the pastures after the first
dream was over and you certainly would have neither the independence of
action nor the background of tragedy so necessary to your genius. That
needs stones to bite on, not husks. . . . Believe me, I know what I am
talking about. I have been through worse. If personal happiness were
brought to me on a gold platter with Divine assurance that it would
last--which it never does--remember that, Clavey--I should laugh in its
face. And if you let her go now you will one day say the same thing
yourself."

But Clavering had made a violent rebound. He threw himself into a
chair and lit a cigarette, smiling at her indulgently. "The trouble
with you, Gora," he said, "is that you are--and probably always
were--artist first and woman last. If you'd got the man you thought
you wanted you'd have chucked him in about six months. But I happen to
be a man first and artist next."

Miss Dwight shrugged her shoulders. "Will you deny that you have been
completely happy while writing that play? So happy and abs