down sweeps the
black uncertainty, and I am afraid, timid, and unnerved."

She looked at him sadly.

"Don't you believe in your work, Lawrence?"

"Yes, that is about all I do believe in."

"Then what is the matter?"

"It is that, after all, thousands of men have believed in their work to
no avail. One can never know whether he is a fad or a real artist. It
isn't only that, either. One's work, when it is his life, requires so
much besides to make it possible. It is that which gives me the blue
fear you see. I always imagine that the thing I want just then is
absolutely essential to my better work. Perhaps it is. I don't know. I
know only that I am persuaded that it is. Then I set about to get that
thing and I fail."

"But do you always fail?" Claire was unconsciously pleading her own
cause.

"Not always. Just often enough to scare me to death when the biggest
need of my life seems just out of reach."

"Nonsense, Lawrence," she laughed. "When you were sick you talked as if
you could reach out and pull down the stars, if you needed them in an
endeavor to complete your life."

"Sometimes I think I could, then the reality of life comes crashing
through the walls of my dream-palace, and, behold, I am standing
desolate and abandoned, grasping at lights which are even too far away
to be seen! I am clawing darkness for something I fancied I could reach,
while, as far as I am concerned, it is clear out of space and time."

She sat pensively looking across the lake.

"Yet you keep on reaching, don't you?"

"Yes--and no. I always wish I could. There are times, Claire, when I
don't want to be a realist, don't want to face life as it is, when it
seems too tawdry to be valuable just as it is; then I reach out into the
night and cry, 'Let me be the maddest of dreamers, the wildest of
idealists, a knight of fancy seeking the illusive dream!'"

Claire laughed aloud as she said, "And don't you know, dear man, that
that is just what you do become at times?"

"I know it. That's the joke of it. All the while I mock myself for being
a romancing idiot!"

"What a state of mind!" she exclaimed.

"It isn't pleasant. Then, worse than that, when I attain my star, I
spoil it with too much scrutiny."

She started. "What do you mean?"

"Just that. I make a mess of it."

"Still I don't understand."

He thought for a moment, then said sadly: "Take the cherub I carved
there"--he nodded in the direction of the house--"I was wil