"Yes. Isn't this starlight magnificent? I've been up to the nursery looking at the infant wonder--just wild to hug him; but he's asleep, and his nurse glared at me. So I thought I'd come and look at something else as unattainable--the stars, Louis," she added, laughing--"not you." "Sure," he said, smiling, "I'm always obtainable. Unlike the infant upon whom you had designs," he added, "I'm neither asleep nor will any nurse glare at you if you care to steal a kiss from me." "I've no inclination to transfer my instinctively maternal transports to you," she said, serenely, "though, maternal solicitude might not be amiss concerning you." "Do you think I need moral supervision?" "Not by me." "By whom?" "Ask me an easier one, Louis. And--I didn't _say_ you needed it at all, did I?" He sat beside her, silent, head lifted, examining the stars. "I'm going back on the midnight," he remarked, casually. "Oh, I'm sorry!" she exclaimed, with her winning frankness. "I'm--there's something I have to attend to in town--" "Work?" "It has to do with my work--indirectly--" She glanced sideways at him, and remained for a moment curiously observant. "How is the work going, anyway?" she asked. He hesitated. "I've apparently come up slap against a blank wall. It isn't easy to explain how I feel--but I've no confidence in myself--" "_You_! No confidence? How absurd!" "It's true," he said a little sullenly. "You are having a spasm of progressive development," she said, calmly. "You take it as a child takes teething--with a squirm and a mental howl instead of a physical yell." He laughed. "I suppose it's something of that sort. But there's more--a self-distrust amounting to self-disgust at moments.... Stephanie, I _want_ to do something good--" "You have--dozens of times." "People say so. The world forgets what is really good--" he made a nervous gesture--"always before us poor twentieth-century men looms the goal guarded by the vast, austere, menacing phantoms of the Masters." [Illustration: "'I know it is _you_. Is it?'"] "Nobody ever won a race looking behind him," she Said, gaily; "let 'em menace and loom!" He laughed in a half-hearted fashion, then his head fell again slowly, and he sat there brooding, silent. "Louis, why are you always dissatisfied?" "I always will be, I suppose." His discontented gaze grew more vague. "Can you never learn to enjoy the moment?" "It goes too quickly, and there are so many others which promise more, and will never fulfil their promise; I know it. We painters know it when we dare to think clearly. It is better not to think too clearly--better to go on and pretend to expect attainment.... Stephanie, sometimes I wish I were in an honest business--selling, buying--and could close up shop and go home to pleasant dreams." "Can't you?"