pouring out his creed in a stream of
burning words. "I am a machine, a sensitive thing that registers what it
feels and knows, that is all. You touch me, my brain registers that
touch, and something in me, the will to live, the desire to create, the
insistent shout for expression says, 'Take that and carve it in stone.'
If I could see, if I were not blind, I would have been a painter. I
would have painted you, almost naked as you were, your eyes filled with
the hunger for life, your face tense with racing thoughts, I would have
painted you fully, all of you, as you were in night-gown and skirt there
in that forest, and you would have shouted to all the world from my
canvas, 'Look at me, I am the primitive, the wild, the passionate, the
tender, the selfish and unselfish living woman. See me as I am,
cultured, refined, educated, elemental withal, and the emblem of
humanity as it is, still stained with the traditional mud of
superstition and blood that marks its origin. Oh, I would have painted
you so, and now I shall carve you so!"

He stopped, and Claire looked at him wildly, her eyes aflame with hate
and admiration.

"You would use another human being that way?" she gasped.

"I would use any one, I would, I will, at any cost to them, to me, if
the outcome be a piece of art, a work that in its truth, its immortal
beauty, shall stand a lasting testimony that I, Lawrence Gordon, have
mastered blindness and registered life correctly."

A great light swept over her mind; that was the key to him. He would
sacrifice himself to conquer blindness--but would he, she wondered, and
instantly her thought found expression.

"Would you crush yourself to create that mastery of blindness?"

He laughed. "I have, I am doing it," he said. "I would go through all
the torment of the world if I might create something lasting, true, and
beautiful."

Claire leaned forward, her lips apart, her eyes bright. That she hated
this man she was sure, yet all her woman's soul was awed by what she now
saw behind his mask of blindness. Then a new thought came to her.

"Might it not be," she asked subtly, "if you hold suffering to be the
key to beauty that you would profit more at last by denying the impulse
to create the thing you are planning?"

He laughed again. "I hold that pain is only the spur to progress. I care
nothing for the sentimentalism you are talking now. I carried you
through the wilderness, I suffered and bore it, I staggered thr