that since he owed that to her, a debt
so unique, so enormous that he could never dream of paying it back in
one lifetime, wasn't it rather absurd and rather mean of him to make a
fuss about the rest? How could he think of anything but that? Didn't the
one stupendous obligation cover everything, and lay him, everlastingly
abject, at her feet? The only graceful act left him was to kneel down
and kiss her feet. And that was what, in spirit, he was always doing. As
for her, she would consider herself paid if she saw the difference and
knew that she had made it.

It was only now, in the hour of achievement, that, looking back and
counting all his flashes and his failures, he realized the difference
she had made. It had seemed to him once that he held his gift, his
vision, on a fragile and uncertain tenure, that it could not be carried
through the tumult and shock of the world without great danger and
difficulty. The thing, as he had said, was tricky; it came and went; and
the fear of losing it was the most overpowering of all fears.

He now perceived that, from the beginning, the thing that had been most
hostile, most dangerous to his vision was this fear. Time after time it
had escaped him when he had hung on to it too hard, and time after time
it had returned when he had let it go, to follow the thundering
batteries of the world. He had not really lost it when he had left off
clutching at it or had flung himself with it into the heart of the
danger. He could not say that he had seen it in the reeking wards, and
fields bloody with battle, or when his hands were at their swift and
delicate work on the bodies of the wounded. But it had the trick of
coming back to him in moments when he least looked for it. He saw now
that its brief vanishings had been followed by brief and faint
appearances, and that when it had left him longest it had returned to
stay. The times of utter destitution were succeeded by perfect and
continuous possession. He saw that nothing had been fatal to it except
his fear.

He had tested it because of his fear. He had chosen his profession as
the extreme test, because of his fear. He had given up his profession,
again because of his fear, fear of success in it, fear of the world's
way of rewarding heroism, the dreadful fear of promotion, of being
caught and branded and tied down. He had thought that to be forced into
a line, to be committed to medicine and surgery, was to burn the ships
of God, to cut