rant in half-awakened response
to his.

How could he believe it--conscious of what he had made of himself
through sheer will and persistent? How could he credit it--remembering
what he already stood for in the world, where he stood, how he had
arrived by the rigid road of self-denial; how he had mounted, steadily,
undismayed, unperturbed, undeterred by the clamour of envy, of
hostility, unseduced by the honey of flattery?

Upright, calm, self-confident, he had forged on straight ahead,
following nobody--battled steadily along the upward path until--out of
the void, suddenly he had come up against a blank wall.

That wall which had halted, perplexed, troubled, dismayed, terrified him
because he was beginning to believe it to be the boundary which marked
his own limitations, suddenly had become a transparent barrier through
which he could see. And what he saw on the other side was an endless
vista leading into infinity. But the path was guarded; Love stood
sentinel there. And that was what he saw ahead of him now, and he knew
that he might pass on if Love willed it--and that he would never care to
pass on alone. But that he _could_ not go forward, ignoring Love,
neither occurred to him nor would he have believed it if it had. Yet, at
times, an indefinable unease possessed him as though some occult
struggle was impending for which he was unprepared.

That struggle had already begun, but he did not know it.

On the contrary all his latent strength and brilliancy had revived,
exquisitely virile; and the new canvas on which he began now to work
blossomed swiftly into magnificent florescence.

A superb riot of colour bewitched the entire composition; never had his
brushes swept with such sun-tipped fluency, never had the fresh
splendour of his hues and tones approached so closely to convincing
himself in the hours of fatigue and coldly sober reaction from the
auto-intoxication of his own facility.

That auto-intoxication had always left his mind and his eye steady and
watchful, although drugged--like the calm judgment of the intoxicated
opportunist at the steering wheel of a racing motor. And a race once run
and ended, a deliberate consideration of results usually justified the
pleasure of the pace.

Yet that mysterious something which some said he lacked, had not yet
appeared. That _something_, according to many, was an elusive quality
born of a sympathy for human suffering--an indefinable and delicate bond
between