s and the white rabbits, so happy! And that saves
me." She sat down on the piano bench. Archie thought she had forgotten
all about him, until she called his name. Her voice was soft now, and
wonderfully sweet. It seemed to come from somewhere deep within her,
there were such strong vibrations in it. "You see, Dr. Archie, what one
really strives for in art is not the sort of thing you are likely to
find when you drop in for a performance at the opera. What one strives
for is so far away, so deep, so beautiful"--she lifted her shoulders
with a long breath, folded her hands in her lap and sat looking at him
with a resignation that made her face noble,--"that there's nothing one
can say about it, Dr. Archie."

Without knowing very well what it was all about, Archie was passionately
stirred for her. "I've always believed in you, Thea; always believed,"
he muttered.

She smiled and closed her eyes. "They save me: the old things, things
like the Kohlers' garden. They are in everything I do."

"In what you sing, you mean?"

"Yes. Not in any direct way,"--she spoke hurriedly,--"the light, the
color, the feeling. Most of all the feeling. It comes in when I'm
working on a part, like the smell of a garden coming in at the window. I
try all the new things, and then go back to the old. Perhaps my feelings
were stronger then. A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's
attitude. I am more or less of an artist now, but then I was nothing
else. When I went with you to Chicago that first time, I carried with me
the essentials, the foundation of all I do now. The point to which I
could go was scratched in me then. I haven't reached it yet, by a long
way."

Archie had a swift flash of memory. Pictures passed before him. "You
mean," he asked wonderingly, "that you knew then that you were so
gifted?"

Thea looked up at him and smiled. "Oh, I didn't know anything! Not
enough to ask you for my trunk when I needed it. But you see, when I set
out from Moonstone with you, I had had a rich, romantic past. I had
lived a long, eventful life, and an artist's life, every hour of it.
Wagner says, in his most beautiful opera, that art is only a way of
remembering youth. And the older we grow the more precious it seems to
us, and the more richly we can present that memory. When we've got it
all out,--the last, the finest thrill of it, the brightest hope of
it,"--she lifted her hand above her head and dropped it,--"then we stop.
We do noth