"Oh, that's like my knight and ogre!" cried Helen. "Do you do sermons and parables? But you have the wrong one running away." Gard looked surprised, and then laughed. "It was all going on round and round a tower, wasn't it? And if the tower were small you couldn't tell which was running away." "But _they_ would know!" said Helen, triumphantly. "But they might differ, or they might forget, on account of going so fast. Then they'd have to stop and ask the lady in the tower to straighten them out." Helen looked puzzled, felt that the parable was too mixed to mean anything now, and suspected Gard of mixing it frivolously. "The lady in the tower is too dizzy, you both run about so fast," said Mrs. Mavering. "But she thinks Helen would never run away." "There's no chance for me to be proud in this tower," said Gard, and Helen murmured: "It's all mixed up." "Music, after all," said Gard, breaking a few moments' silence, "leaves you unsatisfied at your strongest. It is misty emotion. It has wings, but no feet. You seem to want something that has more grip and bite." "That is heresy from you," said Mrs. Mavering. "I've made a creed of heresy, you know. That Massachusetts lecturer preaches the creed, 'Every man his own issue, for conformity is death.' But I don't know whether he has said that conformity to the forms you have made yourself is as much death as conformity to those made by other men. I call myself a musician, and something keeps asking me, 'Is that all?' It seems to think it time I called myself something else." "Then why not call yourself a still better musician?" "Of course, one needn't stand still altogether. You become more skilful with your fingers and feet, and learn better how to render and interpret the emotions, musical ideas, more or less eccentric crotchets, of other men, the best of them dead. Their emotions are not so important, are they? Haven't we eyes of our own to see that grass is green? Oh yes, we compose. Have you seen my new book? It consists of a prelude, that is very bad, and highly praised by competent critics in journals; an offertory, in which Charity appears as despondent of the results of the collection--I'm conceited about that piece--and a symphony in five movements, which is a padded invalid. Room enough for improvement, you see. I might learn to symbolize a mood more accurately. It wouldn't make the mood any less futile. The point is really that it doesn't get you out of a rut, if you make the rut even a very good rut of its kind. The more you dig at it the deeper it grows. There is too much that you never see and never know. You take the shape of your mould. Do you know Dr. Holmes' 'Chambered Nautilus'? The nautilus made a larger shell for himself every time he changed, but the poet didn't comment on his making each shell of the same shape as the last. He was a stale conformer after all, that nautilus."