light,
effectiveness, consuming, as it strengthened, whatever had been passive
or without definite purpose in her nature. Her face seemed to him more
than ever to be without significance judged by a purely physical
standard--more than ever he felt it to be but a delicate and sympathetic
medium for the expression of some radiant quality of soul.

"I did not know--I would not have believed that you could be so cruel,"
he protested with bitterness.

"I can be anything," she answered slowly, drawing her gaze with an
effort from the fire. "Most women can."

The glory of the morning passed from him as suddenly as it had come, and
he told himself with the uncompromising desperation of youth that for
all he cared now his great play might remain forever in oblivion. Life
itself appeared as empty--as futile as his ambition--so empty, indeed,
that he began immediately in the elastic melancholy which comes easily
at twenty-five--to plan the consoling details of an early death. When he
remembered his buoyant happiness of a few hours ago it seemed to him
almost ridiculous, and he experienced a curious sensation of
detachment, of having drifted out of his proper and peculiar place in
life. "I shall never be happy again and I am no longer the same person
that I was yesterday--or even a half hour ago," he thought with a
determination to be completely miserable. Yet even while the words were
in his mind he found himself weighing almost instinctively the literary
value of his new emotion, and to his horror the situation in which he
now stood began slowly to take a dramatic form in his mental vision. The
very attitude into which he had unconsciously fallen--as he paused with
his face averted and his hand tightening with violence upon a book he
had picked up--showed to his imagination as a bit of restrained
emotional acting beyond the footlights.

"Then there's nothing I can do but go straight to the devil," he
declared with resolution, and at the same instant he found to his
supreme self-contempt that he was wondering how the speech would sound
in the mouth of an actor in his drama.

"Or write another play," suggested Laura, while he started quickly and
turned toward the door.

"I'll never write another," he said in a voice of gloom, which he tried
with all his soul to make an honest expression of his state of mind. "I
wish now I hadn't written this one. I wouldn't if I'd known."

"Then it's just as well that you didn't," she retur