an forgive you, after all the lovely things
you've said. Anyway I shall tell no one...."

"Dear Miss Truba: I want to have a portrait painted of myself. I'm
convinced that you can do it very well. Will you undertake the work? I
shall be back in New York shortly after this letter reaches you Monday,
and will wait at the Club until I hear from you. Yours, Andrew
Bedient."

There was an instant in which she was conscious of something militant,
something of the quiet power of the man who does not go home
empty-handed. In his leaving the city Saturday, she perceived one who
wishes to avoid the appearance of evil, and is content to leave his
movements unexplained, trusting to another's perception.

"Vina is right," she said slowly. "'Confronted' is the word."

FIFTEENTH CHAPTER

THE STORY OF THE MOTHER

Andrew Bedient had entered the company of lovers.... There have been
great lovers who were not otherwise great men, but never a great man
who was not a great lover.... On the night he had first seen Beth Truba
across the table, deep within there had been a swift ignition of
altar-flames that would never cease to burn. Often in his reading and
thinking, in pictures he had seen, and in his limited adventures into
music; wherever, in fact, man had done well in the arts, the vision of
some great woman was behind the work for his eyes; famous and lovely
women long-dead, whose kisses are imperishable in tone or pigment or
tale; women who called to themselves for a little space the big-souled
men of their time, and sent them away illustrious. And these men
forever afterward brought their art to witness that such women are the
way to the Way of Life.

Bedient had rejoiced to discover the two women in every great man's
life: the woman who visioned his greatness in the mothering; and the
woman who saw it potentially afterward--and ignited it. How often the
latter loosed a landslide of love at the ignition, and how seldom she
stepped aside to let it pass!

All this thinking for years upon the beauty and fineness of women was
focussed now.... The depth of his humility, and the vastness of his
appreciation were the essential beginnings of the love of this hour,
just as they would be, if he were ready to perform some great creative
expression in art. The boyhood of a genius is a wild turning from one
passionate adoration to another among the masters of his art; often his
gift of appreciation is a generation ahead of his capa