“It’s all the clearer to me,” she insisted, “since we’ve had to give up our music. I can’t work at the piano any more--I may never be able to.” “But even if you could, Corydon, I couldn’t afford to get you one now.” “No, of course not. And you have to give up your violin!” “Much time I have to practice it in our present plight!” “I know--I know! But don’t you see, we lose our last hope of growing together? I’ve a vision that haunts me all the time--you going away to do your work, and staying for longer and longer periods--and I sitting at home to mind the baby!” Day after day he would come back, and she would ask him how the book was going; and he would have to answer that it was not going at all. Then, in his desperation, he would make up his mind to write what he could--to be content with this glimpse of one scene, and with that feeble echo of what he knew the next scene ought to be; and he would bring the result to Corydon, and would discover with a secret pang that she did not know the difference. But then he would ask himself--how could she know the difference? The difference did not exist! His vision of the thing had existed in himself, and in himself alone; if he never uttered it, the world would never know what it might have been--and would never care. Ah, what a future was that to look forward to--to filling the ears of the world with lamentations concerning the books that he might have written! And all the time knowing that the ears of the world were deaf to every sound he made! Section 12. He thought that he realized the bitterness of this tragedy all at once; but the real bitterness was that he had to realize more and more of it every day. It was a tragedy he had to live in the house with. He had to watch it working itself out in all the little affairs of life; he had to see it manifesting itself in his own soul, and in the soul of Corydon, and even in the soul of the child. Worst of all to him, the artist, he had to see it working itself out in what he wrote--in book after book that went out to represent him to the world, and that did not represent him at all, but only represented the Snare in which he had been caught! It was one of the facts about this Snare, that there was no merciful Keeper to come and put the victim out of his misery with a blow upon the head; that he was left alone, to writhe and twist and tear himself to pieces, and to perish of slow exhaustion. It was not a murder--it was a crucifixion!