He glanced up and caught the quizzical look in his friend's eyes. "In love, Repellier? I--in love! I couldn't be if I wanted to. I--without a farthing, with a name to make, and a living to make first." "The living doesn't count; that's a mere accident--with the artist, I mean." "Oh, yes; you successful fellows, who have covered yourself with glory--you find it easy enough to cover yourself with--with flannel and fine linen." "But work only for the glory, the flannel and fine linen will take care of itself." "It sounds very pretty, but it keeps one--well, rather lonely and hungry." "Yes, but those things are all grist to your mill in the end. Disappointment, loneliness, sorrow, every shred of experience, if you only look at it in the right way, it's all your grist--if you're the bigger and truer artist." Repellier himself went to the window and looked out for a moment before he turned and spoke again. "And, by the way, do you know the receipt for preserving a poet? It's very simple; an empty stomach, an empty pocketbook, and an empty bed." "It doesn't always hold," demurred Hartley. "No, but as a rule the less Laura and the more sonnets, my young Petrarch." Before Repellier's musing and kindly old eyes at that moment drifted a hazy memory--the memory of a pale, fragile girl in a Bath chair, listening to the English skylarks on a terraced lawn. She had been speaking to him, tremulously yet passionately, of her young Oxford scholar, her hero; she had been telling of her great hope in him, of her woman's fears for him, winning a friend for him there while she already saw before her the valley of the shadow. "Oh, be kind to him! Be kind to him!" she had cried impulsively, with her hand on her heart and the tears welling to her mournful eyes. Hartley remained moodily silent, and Repellier at last went over to him. "Now before an old David leaves this tent of Saul, my boy, let me give you a little advice. Try hard work. It's God's own anodyne. When the heart gets down--and it will, you know--or the head goes wrong, work. Work, man, work; that's my doctrine. You'll do your best when you are either very happy or very miserable. But when in doubt, work; work like a soldier, yet remember that the artist, like the soldier, can stand for the worst as well as the best in man." Hartley, pacing his room alone when Repellier had taken his departure, knew all this to be true enough. But it could not do away with the canker of unrest and self-disgust that seemed gnawing at the core of his brain. A dozen times that day he sat down at his desk, ready for work; and a dozen times he got up in despair. The mood of impotence, of dissatisfaction, was on him, and was not to be shaken off. He tried to tell himself that it was not of the heart, that it was not love. The very doubt brought its own answer. Eros, he felt, had a way of always claiming his own.