to let that hurt me long. Possibly I should weep, be
cynical, maybe even do something desperate, but at last I would come up
smiling, calm in the faith that my life was deeper, richer for the
experience, and that yours was, too. Or if it proved that yours was not,
I should be amused at the shallowness of the Claire that was, for having
been so simple a dunce as to imagine that you were worth while. I should
thank you for teaching the present Claire to forsake that shallow one,
and should find you a rung on my ladder of life!"

He laughed merrily. "You are strong in your faith, Claire."

"Yes. This winter and you have made me strong," she answered.

"I have made you strong in it?"

"Yes. Last summer, when you dragged me out of the surf, I was full of a
number of ideas I no longer possess."

"But what have I done?"

"You have lived stridently all your life."

"Perhaps so. What of it?"

"I see that is the thing most worth doing."

"What will your husband say to such a doctrine?"

"I don't know. I am not going back to him. We are not the same people we
were a year ago, and he would no more love the present Claire than I
should love the present Howard."

The sky deepened from pink to crimson, but Claire's eyes were staring
blankly on the ground.

"Claire, what do you think is essential to great work?"

"I don't know. To keep at it most likely." She was digging with a little
stick in the grass.

"Perhaps you're right," he agreed. "But sometimes I think it is a lot of
other things; romantic wandering over the earth, a deep and lasting
love, any number of such external factors."

"You don't call love external, do you?"

"I mean a permanent love," he laughed.

"Oh, well, perhaps those are necessary, certainly they would be a help
to you, they would be to any one. But, after all, even a woman isn't
absolutely essential to a man in order that he create great art."

"I think she is," Lawrence insisted.

"Very well, perhaps she is, but"--Claire laughed skeptically--"I know
that she is not the all in all, the alpha and omega, the 'that without
which nothing,' that she is so often told she is by seeking males."

"No," he agreed slowly, "in rare cases of great love that may be true,
but in most cases it isn't."

"It is more likely that what you, the abstract male, really mean is that
you must have some woman as wife and housekeeper."

"Perhaps that is so, although even that needs qualifying."

"I know," sh