"Before? It might be done before, but not after. You may make a man conceited, but you can't give him back the conceit he had on Saturday, if he's lost it all by Monday." "That means that you know you've written a beautiful thing and you only think you'll never write another." "Perhaps it does." (He had to keep it up for the pleasure of hearing her say she believed in him.) "Well, I don't suppose you will write another _Helen in Leuce_." "I'm afraid not." He went on to tell her that the wonder was how he wrote the thing at all. It had been done anyhow, anywhere, in successive bursts or spasms of creative energy; the circumstances of his life (he referred to them with some diffidence) not being exactly favourable to sustained effort. "How did _you_ feel about it?" he inquired. "I can hardly tell you. I think I felt as you feel about anything beautiful that comes to you for the first time. I don't know what it is you've done. It's as if something had been done to me, as if I'd been given a new sense. It's like hearing Beethoven or Wagner for the first time." As she spoke she saw the swift blood grow hot in his face, she saw the slight trembling of the hand that propped his chin and she thought, "Poor fellow, so much emotion for a little praise?" "What did you mean by it?" she said. He considered a moment--as who should say "What the dickens did I mean by it?" Lucia leaned back now, for the first time, in the breathing space he gave her, attentively watching the man she proposed to make her secretary; and as she watched him she found herself defending him against her own criticism. If he dropped his aitches it was not grossly as the illiterate do; she wouldn't go so far as to say he _dropped_ them; he slipped them, slided them; it was no more than a subtle slur, a delicate elision. And that only in the commoner words, the current coin of his world. He was as right as possible, she noticed, in all words whose acquaintance he had made on his own account. And his voice--his voice pleaded against her prejudice with all its lyric modulations. Much may be forgiven to such voices. And there were other points in his favour. Kitty was right. He was nice to look at. She was beginning to know the changes of his face; she liked it best when, as now, its features became suddenly subtle and serious and straight. At the moment his eyes, almost opaque from the thickness of their blue, were dull under the shadow of the eye-bone. But when he grew excited (as he frequently did) they had a way of clearing suddenly, they flashed first colour at you, then light, then fire. That was what they were doing now; for now he let himself go.