It was about a month after the closing of this engagement that I took Sarah's suggestion about applying to Gerald McDermott, but not before I had tried several other things. The truth was, as I knew very well when I faced it, that I had at the time nothing in me. To those who haven't it, a gift is a sort of extra possession, like an eye or a hand that can be commanded to its accustomed trick on any occasion; but to the owners of it it is a libation poured to the Unknown God. I had emptied my cup of its froth of youth, and as yet nothing had touched the profounder experience from which it should be fed and filled again, and I had no technique to supply the insufficiencies of my inspiration. Somewhere within me I felt the stuff of power, stiff and unworkable, needing the flux of passion and the shaping hand of skill. Looking back now from the vantage of a tolerable success, if you were to ask me what, more than any other thing, prevents the fulness of our native art, I should say the blank public misapprehension of its processes. Turning every way to catch the favourable wind, what met me then, was the general conviction on the part of my friends that if you had talent you succeeded anyway, and if you weren't succeeding it was because you hadn't any talent. I suffered many humiliations before I learned how absolutely, by that same society that so liberally resents the implication of any separateness in art, the artist is thrust back upon himself. To do what seemed necessary for the development of my gift, to have a year or two to travel and study, to connote its powers with its limitations, required money; and though there in Chicago there was money for every sort of adventure that stirred the imagination of man, there was none for the particular sort of investment I represented. At least not at the price I was prepared to pay. The half of what had been put into setting my brother on his feet would have served me, but I learned from Effie, that as much of my mother's capital as had been put into Forester's business, was not only impossible to be withdrawn from keeping him upright, but threatened not to hold him so for as long as it was necessary for mother to see in him the figure of a provider. This had been made plain at Christmas, when Effie had written me that a particular wheeled chair which my mother had set her heart upon because of a hope it held out of church-going, would be impossible unless I came forward handsomely. I did come forward on a scale commensurate with the Taylorville estimate of my salary, which was by no means comparable to its purchasing power in Chicago; and now I was beginning to realize that unless some one came forward for me, I stood to lose the Shining Destiny to which I felt myself appointed. I was slow in understanding that it was not to be looked for by any of the paths by which interest and succour are traditionally due. Not, for instance, from Pauline and Henry Mills.