d with
creative fervor when I did that. I put into it a thousand little
thoughts that flashed with imaginative fire. I dreamed things, felt
things that should have made a masterpiece beyond all masterpieces, and
at last the thing was finished. Still under the heat of enthusiasm, I
felt of it, tested it, and found it good. Well, a week later, when the
imaginative flame was gone, I went back and looked at it again. It was
poor, cold, imperfect, not at all what it should have been. I dreamed a
star and made a block of poor wooden imagery."

"But you underestimate your work. To me the cherub is still a star."

He laughed. "It is what others see of good in my work that makes me hope
that sooner or later I will do the thing that will stand eternally a
star of the first magnitude."

"And you will, Lawrence," she said earnestly.

"Perhaps." He was pensive. "Perhaps not. That is where the rest of life
enters in. I want many things; they seem necessary if I am to attain my
eternal star. I am afraid I shall never get them!"

"Have you tried?"

"No, I haven't the courage. If they should be beyond my grasp, if
obtaining them, they should prove to be wrong and not the real things I
need, after all, what then?"

"I don't know." She waited to watch a little colored cloud float by, and
then continued: "Isn't the real interest in life the game you play?"

"I suppose it is, but it's hard on other people."

"Why--and how?"

"Suppose," Lawrence said slowly, "you were the one thing I thought I
needed."

Claire leaned toward him, her lips apart, her heart beating wildly.

"Suppose I were sure of it, and set about to make you part of my life,
well, if I succeeded and then"--he smiled sadly--"found that you were
not the necessity, not the answer to my need, what of you? It would be
an inferno for you, and none the less equally terrible for me! We
couldn't help it. Under such circumstances you would be right in saying
that I had been unfair. I don't know, certainly you would be right in
charging your possible unhappiness to me."

"Under your supposition, Lawrence," she answered evenly, "if you
obtained my love, wouldn't it then be my game, my risk in the great
gamble for deeper life? Wouldn't it be my mistake for having thought you
were what I needed?"

"What if you still thought you needed me after I was sure that I did not
need you?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "I am too fond of life and too eager to know
its possibilities