have a piece of cake, two pieces!
There! And the sugary part, too!"

"You'll make her ill."

"Never mind. If she is ill it is in a good cause. Claudie, just think,
you are going to be another Jacques Sennier! It's too wonderful. And yet
I knew it. Didn't I tell you that night in the opera house? I said it
would be so. Didn't I? Can you deny it?"

"I don't deny it. But--"

"You are made of buts. If it were not for me you would go and hide away
your genius, and no one would ever know you existed at all. It's
pathetic. But you've married a wife who knows what you are, and others
shall know too. The whole world shall know."

He could not help laughing at her wild enthusiasm. But he said, with a
sobriety that almost made her despair:

"You are going too fast, Charmian. I'm not at all sure that I shall be
able to consent to make changes in the opera."

Then began a curious conflict which lasted for days between Claude Heath
on the one side, and Charmian, Alston Lake, and Crayford on the other.
It was really a tragic conflict, for it was, Claude believed, the last
stand made by an artist in defense of his art. Never had he felt so much
alone as during these days of conflict. Yet he was in his own home, with
a wife who was working for him, a devoted friend who was longing for his
success, and a man who was seriously thinking of bringing him and his
work into the notice of the vast world that loves opera. No one knew of
his loneliness. No one even suspected it. And comedy hung, as it ever
does, about the heels of tragedy.

Crayford revealed himself in his conflict. He was a self-made man, and
before he "went in" for opera had been a showman all over the States,
and had made a quantity of money. He had run a menagerie, more than one
circus, had taken about a "fake-hypnotist," a "living-magnet," and other
delights. Then he had "started in" as a music-hall manager. With music
halls he had been marvellously successful. He still held interests in
halls all over the States. More recently he had been one of the first
men to see the possibilities in moving pictures, and had made a big pile
with cinematograph halls. But always, even from the beginning, beneath
the blatant cleverness, the vulgar ingenuities of the showman, there had
been something else; something that had ambition not wholly vulgar, that
had ideals, furtive perhaps, but definite, that had aspirations. And
this something, that was of the soul of the man, was inces