y power to write a
successful drama."

"You work too hard. You must not ruin your health by undue haste. A week
or two will not make a killing difference with us. I don't mind playing
_Lillian_ another month, if you need the time. It is good discipline,
and, besides, I enjoy the part."

"That is because you are good and loyal to a poor writer," he answered,
with a break to humble appreciation of her bounty and her bravery. "Be
patient with me," he pleaded. "_Enid_ will recoup you for all you have
suffered. It will win back all your funds. I have made it as near pure
poetry as our harsh, definite life and our elliptical speech will
permit." And straightway his mind was filled with dreams of conquering,
even while he faced his love, so strangely are courtship and ambition
mingled in the heart of man.

At last he began to exult, to boast, to call attention to the beauty of
the lines spoken by _Enid_. "See how her simplicity and virginal charm
are enhanced by the rugged, remorseless strength, and by the
conscienceless greed of the men surrounding her, and yet she sees in
them something admirable. They are like soldiers to her. They are the
heroes who tunnel mountains and bridge cataracts. When she looks from
her slender, white hands to their gross and powerful bodies she shudders
with a sort of fearsome admiration."

"Can all that appear in the lines?"

"Yes. In the lines and in the acting; it _must_ appear in your acting,"
he added, with a note of admonition.

Her face clouded with pain. "He begins to doubt my ability to delineate
his work," she thought, and turned away in order that he might not know
how deeply he had wounded her.

XIII

Helen's pride contended unceasingly with her love during the weeks of
her lover's alienation; for, with all her sweet dispraise of herself,
she was very proud of her place in the world, and it was not easy to bow
her head to neglect. Sometimes when he forgot to answer her or rushed
away to his room with a hasty good-bye, she raged with a perfectly
justifiable anger. "You are selfish and brutal," she cried out after him
on one occasion. "You think only of yourself. You are vain, egotistical.
All that I have done is forgotten the moment you are stung by
criticism," and she tried to put him aside. "What do his personal
traits matter to me?" she said, as if in answer to her own charge. "He
is my dramatist, not my husband."

But when he came back to her, an absent-minded sm