the mere
physical fact of birth. He was twenty-five, he believed passionately in
his own powers, and he was, he told himself with emphasis, in love for
the first and only time. In the confused tangle of his fancy he saw
Laura like some great white flower, growing out of reach, yet not
entirely beyond endeavour, and the ladder that went up to her was made
by his own immediate successes. Then the footlights before his play swam
in his picture and he heard already the applause of crowded houses and
felt in his head the intoxication of his triumph. Act by act, scene by
scene, he rehearsed in fancy his great drama, seeing the players throng
before the footlights and seeing, too, Laura applauding softly from a
stage box at the side. He had had moments of despondency over his idea,
had grovelled in abject despair during trying periods of execution, but
now all uncertainty--all misgivings evaporated like an obscuring fog
before a burst of light. The light, indeed, had at the moment the full
radiance of a great red glow such as he had seen used for effective
purposes upon the stage--and just as every object of scenery had taken,
for the time, a portion of the transfiguring suffusion--so now the
external ugly details among which he moved were bathed in the high
coloured light of his imagination.

But if the end is sometimes long in coming, it comes at last even to the
visions of youth, and when his tired limbs finally dragged his soaring
spirit to earth, he took a passing car and came home to luncheon. The
glamour had faded suddenly from his dreams, as if a bat's wing had
fluttered overhead, and in his new mood, he felt a resurgence of his old
self-consciousness. He was provoked by the suspicion that he had shown
less as a coming dramatist than as a present fool, and he contrasted his
own awkwardness with Adams' whimsical ease of manner. Did a woman ever
forget how a man appeared when she first met him? Would any amount of
fame to-morrow obliterate from Laura's memory his embarrassment of
yesterday? He had heard that the surface impression was what counted in
the feminine mind, and this made him think enviously, for a minute, of
Perry Bridewell--of his handsome florid face and his pleasant animal
magnetism. Perry was stupid and an egoist, and yet he had heard that
Mrs. Bridewell, for all her beauty and her wit, adored him, while he
openly neglected her. Was the secret of success, after all, simply an
indifference to everyone's n