which are entirely sordid or entirely ideal;
yet we find it so difficult to allow for this in judging one another.

"Don't you understand," Farquhar went on, "all that you have been to me:
how you have awakened the best that is in me, and taught me to be
ashamed of the worst? And do you think that I shall now be content to
let you slip quietly out of my life, and to be the shallow, selfish,
worldly wretch I was before the Academy _soiree_? Not I."

Elisabeth was silent. She could not understand herself, and this want of
comprehension on her part annoyed and disappointed her. At last all her
girlish dreams had come true; here was the fairy prince for whom she had
waited for so long--a prince of the kingdom she loved above all others,
the kingdom of art; and he came to her in the spirit in which she had
always longed for him to come--the spirit of failure and of loneliness,
begging her to make up to him for all that he had hitherto missed in
life. Yet--to her surprise--his appeal found her cold and unresponsive,
as if he were calling out for help to another woman and not to her.

Cecil went on: "Elisabeth, won't you be my wife, and so make me into the
true artist which, with you to help me, I feel I am capable of becoming;
but of which, without you, I shall always fall short? You could do
anything with me--you know you could; you could make me into a great
artist and a good man, but without you I can be neither. Surely you will
not give me up now! You have opened to me the door of a paradise of
which I never dreamed before, and now don't shut it in my face."

"I don't want to shut it in your face," replied Elisabeth gently;
"surely you know me better than that. But I feel that you are expecting
more of me than I can ever fulfil, and that some day you will be sadly
disappointed in me."

"No, no; I never shall. It is not in you to disappoint anybody, you are
so strong and good and true. Tell me the truth: don't you feel that I am
as clay in your hands, and that you can do anything with me that you
choose?"

Elisabeth looked him full in the face with her clear gray eyes. "I feel
that I could do anything with you if only I loved you enough; but I also
feel that I don't love you, and that therefore I can do nothing with you
at all. I believe with you that a strong woman can be the making of a
man she loves; but she must love him first, or else all her strength
will be of no avail."

Farquhar's face fell. "I thought you