t. And don't hold
out for a lure that will reconcile me, my dear friend, anything so
vulgar as success! The single hope I have, when I am the most hopeful,
is that simply my metal, my resistance, may never quite fail. I shall
not have success, dear lady, though in your kindness you predict it. I
shall go on and on seeing with different eyes from other people, carving
my cherry-stones in my own way, and made unsociable by the failure of
others to see how superior my way is. I shall go on growing more
eccentric and solitary, and call myself lucky quite beyond my merits if
those particular snares which the devil Melancholy sets for the solitary
may be escaped, that I may neither drink, nor drug myself, nor shoot
myself, nor marry the cook!"

"Don't talk like that, Gerald!" cried Aurora. "Don't say anything so
awful! Now keep still while I talk, listen while I tell you. You're
going on painting in your own way, but some one--see?--some one is going
to arise bright enough to recognize how perfectly wonderful your
pictures are. Keep still. You mustn't despise success, you know, success
is what everybody needs and wants. You're going to succeed. Keep still.
Stupid people will want to buy your pictures because the people who know
about such things have told the public how wonderful they are. Then
you'll grow rich and famous. You won't be either eccentric or solitary.
You'll have hosts of admiring friends. I guess you could have them now,
if you wanted to. You won't be melancholy. You'll be happy. In your home
there will be a nice wife. Why are you supposing you'll never marry? A
dear true beautiful girl who thinks the world of you and that you think
the world of. And when you're an old gentleman with your grandchildren
playing at your knee, you'll say to yourself, 'Aurora told me so!'"

She was all cheering smiles and dimples again.

"Be sure you remember now," she said, holding up a finger and shaking it
to mark her bidding, "to say to yourself, 'Aurora told me so!'"

It was a pity almost that Gerald should not have gone home at that
point. He would have left with undividedly fond and approving feelings;
he would have left tied to Aurora by a thousand sweet humanities in
common, as well as impressed afresh by the depth and mysteriousness of
woman. But he had either forgotten or was disregarding the hour--the
clock on the mantelpiece, like most ornamental clocks, was not going;
the bliss of being warm for the first time in d