"Better split it," remarked Louis, "than stop all driving. Poor fellow, I'm sorry for him; nothing hurts like having your pride dragged in the mud, and nothing brings keener suffering--I've seen it and know. Why didn't you brace him up again, High-Muck?" "I did try, but it was too late. Just before he died he wrote me the old refrain: 'At twenty-five I might have weathered it, but not at fifty.'" Herbert drew his chair closer, assuming his favorite gesture, his hands on the edge of the table. "I say 'poor fellow' too, Louis, but High-Muck has not put his finger on the right spot. It was not the man's pride that was wounded; nor did he die of a broken heart. He died because he had not reached his pinnacle, and that is quite a different thing. What blinded him and destroyed his reason--for it cannot be thought very sensible for a man to abandon a certain fixed income for a rainbow--was not your reviving his belief in himself, but your giving him, for the first time, an opportunity to spread his wings. But for that you could not have persuaded him to write a line. The pitiful thing was that the wings were not large enough--still they were _wings_ to be used in the air of romance, and not legs with which to tread the roads of the commonplace, and he knew it. He had felt them growing ever since he was a boy. It is only a question of the spread of one's feathers, after all, whether one succeeds soaring over mountains with a view of the never-ending Valley of Content below, or whether one keeps on grovelling in the mud." As Herbert paused a tremulous silence fell upon the group. That he, of all men, should thus penetrate, if not espouse, the cause of failure--the hardest of all things for a man of phenomenal success to comprehend or excuse in his fellows--came as a new note. "To illustrate this theory," he continued, unconscious of the effect he had produced, "I will tell you about a man whom I once came across in one of the studios of Paris, back of the Pantheon. All his life he had determined to be a sculptor--and when I say 'determined' I mean he had thought of nothing else. By day he worked in the atelier, at night he drew from a cast--a custom then of the young sculptors. In the Louvre and in the Luxembourg--out in the gardens of the Tuileries--wherever there was something moulded or cut into form, there at odd hours you could always find this enthusiast. At night too, when the other students were trooping through the Quartier, breaking things or outrunning the gendarmes, this poor devil was working away, doing Ledas and Venuses and groups of nudes, with rearing horses and chariots,--all the trite subjects a young sculptor attempts whose imagination outruns his ability.