d. "Of the _motif_?" he asked.

"It was confused," she answered. "That is my only criticism in the large
way. I followed the story, but there seemed so much else. It is too
wordy. You clog the action by introducing so much extraneous material."

"That was the major _motif_," he hurriedly explained, "the big
underrunning _motif_, the cosmic and universal thing. I tried to make it
keep time with the story itself, which was only superficial after all. I
was on the right scent, but I guess I did it badly. I did not succeed in
suggesting what I was driving at. But I'll learn in time."

She did not follow him. She was a bachelor of arts, but he had gone
beyond her limitations. This she did not comprehend, attributing her
incomprehension to his incoherence.

"You were too voluble," she said. "But it was beautiful, in places."

He heard her voice as from far off, for he was debating whether he would
read her the "Sea Lyrics." He lay in dull despair, while she watched him
searchingly, pondering again upon unsummoned and wayward thoughts of
marriage.

"You want to be famous?" she asked abruptly.

"Yes, a little bit," he confessed. "That is part of the adventure. It
is not the being famous, but the process of becoming so, that counts. And
after all, to be famous would be, for me, only a means to something else.
I want to be famous very much, for that matter, and for that reason."

"For your sake," he wanted to add, and might have added had she proved
enthusiastic over what he had read to her.

But she was too busy in her mind, carving out a career for him that would
at least be possible, to ask what the ultimate something was which he had
hinted at. There was no career for him in literature. Of that she was
convinced. He had proved it to-day, with his amateurish and sophomoric
productions. He could talk well, but he was incapable of expressing
himself in a literary way. She compared Tennyson, and Browning, and her
favorite prose masters with him, and to his hopeless discredit. Yet she
did not tell him her whole mind. Her strange interest in him led her to
temporize. His desire to write was, after all, a little weakness which
he would grow out of in time. Then he would devote himself to the more
serious affairs of life. And he would succeed, too. She knew that. He
was so strong that he could not fail--if only he would drop writing.

"I wish you would show me all you write, Mr. Eden," she said.