th. "Men are all
cowards, put them to the test."

The energetic woman judged from a too narrow basis. Because Mavick was
weak--and she had always secretly despised him for yielding to her--weak
as compared with her own indomitable spirit, she generalized wildly. Her
opinion of men would have been modified if she had come in contact with
Murad Ault.

To one man in New York besides Mr. Ault the failure did not seem a
personal calamity. When Philip saw in the steamer departures the name of
Lord Montague, his spirits rose in spite of the thought that the heiress
was no longer an heiress. The sky lifted, there was a promise of fair
weather, the storm, for him, had indeed cleared the air.

"Dear Philip," wrote Miss McDonald, "it is really dreadful news, but I
cannot be so very downhearted. It is the least of calamities that could
happen to my dear child. Didn't I tell you that it is always darkest
just before the dawn?"

And Philip needed the hope of the dawn. Trial is good for any one, but
hopeless suffering for none. Philip had not been without hope, but it
was a visionary indulgence, against all evidence. It was the hope of
youth, not of reason. He stuck to his business doggedly, he stuck to his
writing doggedly, but over all his mind was a cloud, an oppression not
favorable to creative effort--that is, creative effort sweet and not
cynical, sunny and not morbid.

And yet, who shall say that this very experience, this oppression of
circumstance, was not the thing needed for the development of the best
that was in him? Thrown back upon himself and denied an airy soaring in
the heights of a prosperous fancy, he had come to know himself and his
limitations. And in the year he had learned a great deal about his art.
For one thing he had come to the ground. He was looking more at life
as it is. His experience at the publishers had taught him one important
truth, and that is that a big subject does not make a big writer, that
all that any mind can contribute to the general thought of the world in
literature is what is in itself, and if there is nothing in himself it
is vain for the writer to go far afield for a theme. He had seen the
young artists, fretting for want of subjects, wandering the world over
in search of an object fitted to their genius, setting up their easels
in front of the marvels of nature and of art, in the expectation that
genius would descend upon them.

If they could find something big enough to paint