“Are you trying to be stupid?” she asked almost impatiently. “I don’t think I’m stupid at all. I’m just enjoying things. That patch of electric light, and this rain, and this--” She interrupted him: “And I’ve been disturbing your peaceful soul. Just let me turn on a light for a minute to find a book, and then I’ll leave you to the contemplation of your street lamp.” She spoke laughingly, but he saw that she meant it. “Don’t go, Dick. I want to talk to you. I was just getting myself together.” Dick dropped back upon the sofa from which she had half arisen. The situation was going from bad to worse. “I must own up at last to something that I’ve known for months and haven’t been willing to admit to myself. I’ve been trying to convince myself that it wasn’t so; but it’s no use for me to pretend any longer. I’m making myself ridiculous by plugging away down there at the bank.” Dick gasped. She was glad the room was dark, for she could feel her face burning. “Please don’t think,” Jack went on, quite innocently, “that it’s the work I don’t like; I really enjoy the drudgery. It’s the doing it so badly that’s discouraging. I’m just a regular fool down there. Why, I come up here evenings and laugh over Hillsmead, but I’ll wager it isn’t a circumstance to the way Hillsmead laughs over me. It isn’t as though I shirked my work and didn’t care. I’ve been doing the best I know, and worrying myself gray-headed over it; I’m kept back by sheer mental incapacity.” “That’s nonsense.” “Oh, I thought so myself at first,” he answered, with a laugh, “and I went on telling myself so, long after I knew it wasn’t.” There was a short pause, and then he went on: “I went into the bank partly because it was an amusing novelty, and partly with the insane idea that I was rather more intelligent than the average born-and-bred bank clerk, and that I could do his work unusually well. But the main reason why I did it was that I wanted to convince you that I was really some good after all. It was a sort of gallery play when you come to look at it.” “I think that’s about the unfairest thing you ever said: unfair to both of us.” “I don’t mean it just as it sounds. It wasn’t your fault that you never took me seriously. You couldn’t, because I didn’t myself. I was contented with amusing myself at the expense of people who took things seriously. “I’ve learned other things in the last six months besides the fact that I’ll never be worth more than fifteen dollars a week in a bank.” His words halted there. They had been coming easily enough until now, for they had put off a little the declaration that he knew he must make. They had meant nothing, but this next sentence--yes, it must be the next--might sweep away the hope that had grown to be the dearest thing he owned.