wing ourselves all
the while; only some of us are not worth paying."

"You're extraordinarily droll, but somehow I can't laugh at you," he
said, his handsome face drawn by his pain to a contraction sufficiently
attesting the fact. "Do you remember the second time I ever saw you--the
day you recited at my place?" he abruptly asked; a good deal as if he
were taking from his quiver an arrow which, if it was the last, was also
one of the sharpest.

"Perfectly, and what an idiot I was, though it was only yesterday!"

"You expressed to me then a deep detestation of the sort of
self-exposure to which the profession you were taking up would commit
you. If you compared yourself to a contortionist at a country fair I'm
only taking my cue from you."

"I don't know what I may have said then," replied Miriam, whose steady
flight was not arrested by this ineffectual bolt; "I was no doubt
already wonderful for talking of things I know nothing about. I was only
on the brink of the stream and I perhaps thought the water colder than
it is. One warms it a bit one's self when once one's in. Of course I'm a
contortionist and of course there's a hateful side, but don't you see
how that very fact puts a price on every compensation, on the help of
those who are ready to insist on the _other_ side, the grand one, and
especially on the sympathy of the person who's ready to insist most and
to keep before us the great thing, the element that makes up for
everything?"

"The element--?" Peter questioned with a vagueness that was pardonably
exaggerated. "Do you mean your success?"

"I mean what you've so often been eloquent about," she returned with an
indulgent shrug--"the way we simply stir people's souls. Ah there's
where life can help us," she broke out with a change of tone, "there's
where human relations and affections can help us; love and faith and joy
and suffering and experience--I don't know what to call 'em! They
suggest things, they light them up and sanctify them, as you may say;
they make them appear worth doing." She became radiant a while, as if
with a splendid vision; then melting into still another accent, which
seemed all nature and harmony and charity, she proceeded: "I must tell
you that in the matter of what we can do for each other I have a
tremendously high ideal. I go in for closeness of union, for identity of
interest. A true marriage, as they call it, must do one a lot of good!"

He stood there looking at her for a