es to it for ever.

He knew that Isabel was the woman God had made for him, sweet, dear
Jenny the woman he had made for himself, and he bowed before the work of
the greater artist.

Never voice nor look nor touch of woman had affected Theophil before as
the least tone or glance or movement of Isabel stirred him to the centre
of his being. To meet her eyes was to release a music that went
shuddering through the whole world; her lightest word was filled with
echoes of infinite things. Not a lover only, but anyone with instincts
for such perceptions, looking at Isabel, would have said: There is a
woman who is needed to make some man a great poet, a great artist, some
kind of great man! She belongs to the history-making women. Hundreds of
women will attract men by the hundred where she will attract
comparatively few, but that few will be the pick of men; and some day,
when the other women have gone the way of all sweet roses, she will
still remain (if she has found an artist to understand her face) the
frontispiece of some distinguished biography, or hang in a gallery of
the period among the few faces that were indestructibly personal; not
the faces that have lived, but the faces that still go on living, the
faces that are influences still, the unique, daemonic faces.

Isabel was indeed a muse that waited for her poet. The mere idea of such
a woman, cherished across dividing seas and separating years, will help
a man be great. To grow great near or far is the one way to be hers, and
to pile up great work for her sake is perhaps the best way to love her.
She could never be his wife, but she might still be his muse, resolved
Theophil, feigning in that reflection for the moment a more human
comfort than, alas! there really was.

But was there to be no loss to Jenny in this?

"True love in this differs from gold or clay,
That to divide is not to take away."

It is the convenient old plea of the poets, and yet it is sometimes
true. It was true here. There is, I know, a sort of primitive man or
woman--I believe they will some day be exhibited in menageries--who
cannot be on with a new love without being ungratefully off with the
old. All depends of what the two loves are made. If it is bodily fire
and no more, of course the new love will put out the old as the great
sun puts out a little smouldering fire; and the majority of so-called
love-stories are merely disastrous conflagrations of that sort. In such
cases t