“Your poems are stiff and dimly tinted, like a row of plaster-of-paris dolls standing on a dusty and venerated shelf. Don’t you see? You talk about twenty times better than you write, and I can’t understand this peculiar incongruity. Perhaps you’ve been taught that poetry is something that must be ethereal and noble at all costs, and perhaps you’ve been inarticulate because the rest of you has been at war with this one illusion. I don’t feel that you’ve looked upon poetry as a place where you could express your actual thoughts and feelings.” When a man has been intangibly blind for a long time, he usually stumbles at last, accidentally, upon an incident or challenge that makes him totter on the edge of vision, and in that moment it is revealed whether this blindness has been innate or not. If he wavers, then his lack of sight has been an artificial ailment, and if his first reaction after the stumble is one of stubborn irritation his tightly-shut eyes are not apt to open. Carl felt, without quite being able to shape the picture, that he was walking out of a sublime bric-a-brac shop, and yet the contact of him, left behind in the shop, continued to speak with his words. As he discussed poetry with Clara he began slowly to feel that he had been a minute and prisoned fool, although his words writhed in an effort to escape an absolute admission. She gave him practical scoldings, also, concerning the exact way in which manuscripts should be submitted to editors, and he listened with the amusement that a man feels when he suddenly sees that he has been walking along a street with his shoes unlaced. She gave him, again and again, her hazily maternal smile in which sensual desires selfishly clothed themselves in an ancient and soothing dress known as kindness. “I do hope that I’ve helped you,” she said. “I’d like to feel that I’ve aided someone to discover his real self.”