"I go to see her when I can. I have been with her this summer. It is like visiting some little girl I knew when I was a lad.... I wanted you to know." "Does she suffer?" "Apparently not. She just is, that's all. No past, no future." "But your past, your future, Martin?" "I can have none," he said steadily. "Did you love her very much?" "I suppose so, as a boy. What does a child of twenty know of love? She was eighteen when we ran away. After about five years this malady developed, a sort of melancholia at first, then a kind of mental vacuity for all these many years." "It's unfair; it's cruel!" she cried. "So it is. There have been times when I have cursed God in fury, but after all it is not left us to choose our own tests. If Fate were only kind, we would not need to woo her. Perhaps I needed my hard years as you needed yours." "I can't believe that, but I know what they have made of you--what I have reaped from them." He laid his hand on hers for a second. "Thank you, Jane. You've been a little flowering place for me, of repose and peace. Tell me about the work." "It grows in plan, but not in execution. I lie abed until noon, these days, and I spend the time thinking about the book. I make notes; sometimes I write a chapter. But I feel that when my baby comes I shall suddenly enter a new world, I shall know such wonderful things to put in my book." "Assuredly. You could not plumb the one greatest spiritual and physical experience without your eyes being unsealed to all the fundamental verities." Jane rose, and turned a canvas, which leaned against the wall, into the light, where Martin could see it. "Do you like this?" she asked. He looked at it silently for several moments. "Jerry has sensed it, too," he said. "This is a fine thing--his best." "He can paint, if I can get him away from those portraits." "It's a cursed thing for an artist to be clever. He would better be mediocre. It's your husband's curse. He may have a big gift, but if his cleverness is the thing the rabble want to buy, and he sells it to them, his gift is doomed." "Who's doomed?" said Jerry, coming in, glowing from his long tramp in the rain. "You are, if you paint Mrs. Abercrombie Brendon, when you can do this," Christiansen answered. "You like that?" "This has feeling and excellent painting. It is real, vital, fine." "I felt I had something there." "You've got a pretty knack with pretty ladies, but don't let it ruin you." "Pretty ladies pay, it might be added, and we need the money just now." "Face the truth, then. Swear to yourself this is a temporary aberration, and be true to yourself, Paxton." "Well, if I don't turn out to be my own best self with Jane, and Bobs, and now you after me, I haven't any best self! My own opinion is that I'm probably a rotten second-rater." "Not even the greatest artists are first-rate all the time, Jerry," Jane urged.