pictures out of it. Now I, on the
contrary, have no ulterior motives; I don't want to make anything
out of it."

"I wasn't talking about nature. I want to know what you are going to
make of your life."

"There you are again. Why should I make anything of it? You talk as
if life were so much raw material to be worked into something that
it isn't. To my mind it's beautiful enough as it is. I should spoil
it if I tried to make anything of it."

He looked at her and he understood. He was a man of talent, some
said of genius, but in her there was something greater than that; it
was the genius of temperament, an infinite capacity for taking
pleasures. To her life was more than mere raw material, it came
finished to her hands, because it had lived a long life in her soul.
Her dream had tallied.

Beside that rich creative impulse, that divine imagination of hers,
his own appeared as something imitative and secondhand, and his art
essentially degraded. He was nothing better than a copyist, the
plagiarist of nature.

He looked up to where Mr. Manby sat smiling over his sketching
block, Mr. Manby, surrounded by his admiring family. Mr. Manby did
not see them; he was wrapped in his dream, absorbed in his talent
with all its innocent enormities. He at any rate had no misgivings.
The little girls, Eileen and Ermyntrude, played about him; they
played with blocks and life-buoys and cables, they jumped over coils
of rope, they spun round to leeward till the wind wound their faces
in their long hair, they ran for'ard, shrieking with happy laughter
as they were caught by the showers of spray flung from the yacht's
bows. Frida's eyes followed them, and Durant's eyes followed
Frida's.

"They are seeing the world, too, it seems."

"Yes; they have caught the fever. But they are young, as you see;
they have taken it in time. Some day they'll be tired of wandering,
and they'll settle down in a house of their own, over here in
England, and be dear little wives and mothers."

"Eileen and Ermyntrude--by the way, I never know which is Eileen and
which is Ermyntrude. And you, will you never be tired of wandering?"

She looked at him with the lucid, penetrating gaze he knew so well.
"Never. I took the fever when I was--not young, and it goes harder
with you then. There's no hope for me; I shall never be cured."

She rose and joined the Manbys. The little girls ran to meet her,
they clung to her skirts and danced round her; she put her