tic. At last he
came upon what he sought, a large scraper, and he pounced on
it with a cry of triumph. He seized it as though it were a
dagger, and ran to the picture.

As Stroeve told me this he became as excited as when the
incident occurred, and he took hold of a dinner-knife on the
table between us, and brandished it. He lifted his arm as
though to strike, and then, opening his hand, let it fall with
a clatter to the ground. He looked at me with a tremulous smile.
He did not speak.

"Fire away," I said.

"I don't know what happened to me. I was just going to make a
great hole in the picture, I had my arm all ready for the
blow, when suddenly I seemed to see it."

"See what?"

"The picture. It was a work of art. I couldn't touch it.
I was afraid."

Stroeve was silent again, and he stared at me with his mouth
open and his round blue eyes starting out of his head.

"It was a great, a wonderful picture. I was seized with awe.
I had nearly committed a dreadful crime. I moved a little to
see it better, and my foot knocked against the scraper.
I shuddered."

I really felt something of the emotion that had caught him.
I was strangely impressed. It was as though I were suddenly
transported into a world in which the values were changed.
I stood by, at a loss, like a stranger in a land where the
reactions of man to familiar things are all different from
those he has known. Stroeve tried to talk to me about the
picture, but he was incoherent, and I had to guess at what he meant.
Strickland had burst the bonds that hitherto had held him.
He had found, not himself, as the phrase goes, but a new
soul with unsuspected powers. It was not only the bold
simplification of the drawing which showed so rich and so
singular a personality; it was not only the painting, though
the flesh was painted with a passionate sensuality which had
in it something miraculous; it was not only the solidity, so
that you felt extraordinarily the weight of the body; there
was also a spirituality, troubling and new, which led the
imagination along unsuspected ways, and suggested dim empty
spaces, lit only by the eternal stars, where the soul, all
naked, adventured fearful to the discovery of new mysteries.

If I am rhetorical it is because Stroeve was rhetorical.
(Do we not know that man in moments of emotion expresses himself
naturally in the terms of a novelette?) Stroeve was trying to
express a feeling which he had never known