s a cab-horse! Pride and dignity demand
that we be patient, absolutely. For the sake of certain beautiful things
and sweet people in the world, we must give it a good name. But hear me!
Hear me giving counsels to you--you who without formulating these ideas
act on them, whilst with me they are things which I see as fit to be
done but can never hope to do."

"You, too, Gerald, poor boy," was Aurora's simple reply--"you, too, have
had lots to try you."

He swept aside by a gesture the subject of his trials, removed it
altogether from the horizon, unwilling really that the interest be
shifted from her to him. She was equally determined, now that he had
sympathized with her, to sympathize with him.

"I know you have," she insisted; "I know you've had lots to try you,
just as you knew that I'd had lots. And you're so high-strung, so
sensitive ... I never knew anybody like you. But there are good times
coming for you; I'm sure of it."

"I don't in the least expect them." He laughed a little harshly. He had
winced at her description of him as sensitive, high-strung. "Dear
incurable optimist, I don't in the least expect them. It's not because
there will be compensation that I hold it the decentest thing to put up
with the _mechancetes_ of fate, fate's ingenious stabs in the
tender, as they come, without giving the exhibition of one's
vulnerability, or poisoning one's system with hate!"

"But there will," she continued to insist, "there will be compensations.
I know it just as well.... You have so much talent, it's perfectly
wonderful, and it's only a question of time your having the success you
deserve. I, of course, am not educated up to your paintings, but even I
am beginning to see something more than I did at first. I can see, for
instance, that almost any fine painter, with a command of his colors,
could have done the picture down-stairs, but that only you in the whole
world could have done this one here. But, I say again, my opinion isn't
worth anything. But there's Leslie, who knows all about art and such
things, doesn't she? Well, she 's told me how wonderful you are. From
what she's told me I'm perfectly sure you'll make your mark in the
world."

Again Gerald swept her words aside like noxious obscuring cobwebs. "What
is, few know, and what will be, nobody knows whatever," he said. "But of
all things, I beg, I beg you will not think of me as a misunderstood
genius! Art is not a passion with me, it is--an interes