kind once to her teacher, in the midst of a bitter struggle.
Harsanyi turned the light of his wonderful eye upon her--poor fellow, he
had but one, though that was set in such a handsome head--and said
slowly: "Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than
the other time, and longer. Your mother did not bring anything into the
world to play piano. That you must bring into the world yourself."

This comforted Thea temporarily, for it seemed to give her a chance. But
a great deal of the time she was comfortless. Her letters to Dr. Archie
were brief and businesslike. She was not apt to chatter much, even in
the stimulating company of people she liked, and to chatter on paper was
simply impossible for her. If she tried to write him anything definite
about her work, she immediately scratched it out as being only partially
true, or not true at all. Nothing that she could say about her studies
seemed unqualifiedly true, once she put it down on paper.

Late one afternoon, when she was thoroughly tired and wanted to struggle
on into the dusk, Harsanyi, tired too, threw up his hands and laughed at
her. "Not to-day, Miss Kronborg. That sonata will keep; it won't run
away. Even if you and I should not waken up to-morrow, it will be
there."

Thea turned to him fiercely. "No, it isn't here unless I have it--not
for me," she cried passionately. "Only what I hold in my two hands is
there for me!"

Harsanyi made no reply. He took a deep breath and sat down again. "The
second movement now, quietly, with the shoulders relaxed."

There were hours, too, of great exaltation; when she was at her best and
became a part of what she was doing and ceased to exist in any other
sense. There were other times when she was so shattered by ideas that
she could do nothing worth while; when they trampled over her like an
army and she felt as if she were bleeding to death under them. She
sometimes came home from a late lesson so exhausted that she could eat
no supper. If she tried to eat, she was ill afterward. She used to throw
herself upon the bed and lie there in the dark, not thinking, not
feeling, but evaporating. That same night, perhaps, she would waken up
rested and calm, and as she went over her work in her mind, the passages
seemed to become something of themselves, to take a sort of pattern in
the darkness. She had never learned to work away from the piano until
she came to Harsanyi, and it helped her more than anything had e