“What guarantee have you of that?” he asked, in a tone that was unusually hard, because he did not feel hard. Her presence, her voice, her repose above all, affected his uneasy mind profoundly. It was amazing that anyone should care two damns whether he wasted his life or not. “I think I had better tell you,” she said. “I didn’t intend to. There’s a sort of convention that you mustn’t tell people good of themselves, but I shall tell you this now. I have Mr. Alter’s guarantee.” “Because he said he liked my work? It’s so easy to say that.” “No--more than that. He said you were an example of godless waste.” “Good heavens!” John exclaimed with a laugh. “And he said,” she went on, “that he believed you could, if you would, be a great man. I asked him at once what reasons he had for saying that. He gave me certain points in your work: I shan’t repeat them or you will strain after them and exaggerate them. But he thought them decisive. He showed your work to other men whose opinions confirmed his own.... What now?” “It’s wonderfully good to hear,” John said unsteadily. “Margaret, tell me the special points he hit on. I don’t see how it is possible to be sure at this stage.” “I’ll tell you one point--too general for you to exaggerate and spoil. He said that you wrote naturally, established a curious intimacy with your audience, and that yet what you said was momentous--the rarest of combinations. And he repeated what you heard him say that night at dinner--that your images were chosen with the eyes tight shut or wide open--the full vision, inward or outward. He gave instances.” “What instances?” “Those I can’t tell you. If I did you would be bound to imitate them.” He thought over this in silence. “Margaret,” he said, “may not this be mere talk? You know how great men love an occasional enthusiasm. Mr. Alter is in no way bound by what he says.” “He acts on it, at any rate. He went to see your mother about it.” “She wrote that he had called.” “He has called often,” Margaret said. She smiled as she remembered his words, spoken after one of those expeditions to the country. “Mrs. Lynwood is delightful,” he had said. “She understands everything except her son. She wishes he would settle down to the Navy--a fixed income and an open-air life. She smiles at his poetry, and says, ‘Yes, I dare say it is good, Wing, and I’m glad he does it so well; but there’s no money in it. And we are dreadfully poor, you know.’” Margaret told John nothing of this. If Mrs. Lynwood did not see fit to mention to her son that she had known Wingfield Alter long enough and intimately enough to call him “Wing,” she had probably good reasons for concealing the fact. “I must think over all this,” John said. “I want to tell Hartington about it. Hartington is the Sub.” “The Sub?” she said in surprise. “Does the Sub listen kindly to poetry?” “Yes, thank Heaven. You must meet him soon.... And I’ll try to write to-night, Margaret.” “No; don’t _try_.”