"Nothing. That's all they can find to say--all they dare say. You know what they are--what other men are--and some of the younger girls, too. Not that I don't like them--and they are very sweet to me--only they're not like you--" "They're more human. Is that it, Valerie?" "No, I don't mean that!" "Yes, you do. You mean that the others take life in a perfectly human manner--find enjoyment, amusement in each other, in a hundred things outside of their work. They act like men and women, not like a painting machine; if they experience impulses and emotions they don't entirely stifle 'em. They have time and leisure to foregather, laugh, be silly, discuss, banter, flirt, make love, and cut up all the various harmless capers that humanity is heir to. _That's_ what you mean, but you don't realise it. And you think, and they think, that my solemn and owlish self-suppression is drying me up, squeezing out of me the essence of that warm, lovable humanity in which, they say, my work is deficient. They say, too, that my inspiration is lacking in that it is not founded on personal experience; that I have never known any deep emotion, any suffering, any of the sterner, darker regrets--anything of that passion which I sometimes depict. They say that the personal and convincing element is totally absent because I have not lived"--he laughed--"and loved; that my work lacks the one thing which only the self-knowledge of great happiness and great pain can lend to it.... And--I think they are right, Valerie. What do you think?" The girl stood silent, with lowered eyes, reflecting for a moment. Then she looked up curiously. "_Have_ you never been very unhappy?" "I had a toothache once." She said, unsmiling: "Haven't you ever suffered mentally?" "No--not seriously. Oh, I've regretted little secret meannesses--bad temper, jealousy--" "Nothing else? Have you never experienced deep unhappiness--through death, for example?" "No, thank God. My father and mother and sister are living.... It is rather strange," he added, partly to himself, "that the usual troubles and sorrows have so far passed me by. I am twenty-seven; there has never been a death in my family, or among my intimate friends." "Have you any intimate friends?" "Well--perhaps not--in the strict sense. I don't confide." "Have you never cared, very much, for anybody--any woman?" "Not sentimentally," he returned, laughing. "Do you think that a good course of modern flirtation--a thorough schooling in the old-fashioned misfortunes of true love would inject into my canvases that elusively occult quality they're all howling for?" She remained smilingly silent. "Perhaps something less strenuous would do," he said, mischievously--"a pretty amourette?--just one of those gay, frivolous, Louis XV affairs with some daintily receptive girl, not really improper, but only ultra fashionable. Do you think _that_ would help some, Valerie?"