ate of being
oppressed by the thought of my new book. I don't know what has come to
me. I am all fretty about it. Writing has lost its charm. I doubt if I
shall ever do well enough to make it worth while to write at all. And
even if I could, I don't think mere literary success would satisfy me.
I have tasted enough of that to know what it would be--a sordid
triumph, a mere personal thing."

"Ideala does not think that it is necessarily as a literary woman that
you will succeed," Angelica answered. "_I_ thought it was because all
the indications you have given of special capacity seem to me to lie
in that direction. However, versatile people make mistakes sometimes.
They don't always begin with the work they are best able to do; but
there is no time lost, for one thing helps another--one thing is
necessary to another, I _should_ say, perhaps. Your writing may have
helped to perfect you in some other form of expression."

"You cheer me!" Beth exclaimed. "But what form?" She reflected a
little, and then she put the puzzle from her. "It will come to me, I
dare say," she said, "if I shut the din of the world far from me, and
sit with folded arms in contemplation, waiting for the moment and the
match which shall fire me to the right pitch of enthusiasm. Nothing
worth doing in art is done by calculation."

"I think you are right to keep out of the crowd," said Angelica. "You
will get nothing but distraction from without. I should take one of
the privileges of a great success to be the right to refuse all
invitations that draw one into the social swim. Men and women of high
purpose do not arrive in order to be crowded into stuffy drawing-rooms
to be stared at."

"My idea of perfect bliss," Beth pursued, "when my work is done, and
my friends are not with me, is to lie my length upon a cliff above the
sea, listening to the many-murmurous, soothed by it into a sense of
oneness with Nature, till I seem to be mixed with the elements, a part
of sky and sea and shore, and akin to the wandering winds. This mood
for my easy moments; but give me work for my live delight. I know
nothing so altogether ecstatic as a good mood for work."

"What you call work is power of expression," said Angelica; "the power
to express something in yourself, I fancy."

"Ye--yes," Beth answered, hesitating, as if the notion were new to
her. "I believe you are right. What I call work is the effort to
express myself."

Mr. Kilroy had come in while they