tried to
pick out the pictures he would like. If they could not decide how a
passage should be sung, or were in doubt regarding the attitude and
gesture best fitted to carry on a dramatic action, she had noticed that,
if they separated so that they might arrive at individual conclusions,
they almost always happened upon the same. To each other they now
affected not to know from whom a certain quaint notion had come--clearly
it had been inspired by him, but which had first expressed it was not
sure--that the three great type operas were "Tristan and Isolde," the
"Barber of Seville," and "La Belle Helene." Nor were they sure which had
first suggested that in the last week of her stage career she should
appear in all three parts. Evelyn Innes, as La Belle Helene, would set
musical London by the ears.

She had often wondered whether, by having absorbed so much of Owen's
character, she had proved herself deficient in character. Owen
maintained, on the contrary, that the sign of genius is the power of
recognising and assimilating that which is necessary to the development
of oneself. He mentioned Goethe's life, which he said was but the tale
of a long assimilation of ideas. The narrow, barren soul is narrow and
barren because it cannot acquire. We come into the world with nothing in
our own right except the capacity for the acquisition of ideas. We
cannot invent ideas; we can only gather some of those in circulation
since the beginning of the world. We endow them with the colour and form
of our time, and, if that colour and form be of supreme quality, the
work is preserved as representative of a period in the history of
civilisation; a name may or may not be attached to each specimen. Genius
is merely the power of assimilation; only the fool imagines he invents.
Owen would go still further. He maintained that if the circumstances of
a man's life admitted the acquisition of only one set of ideas, his work
was thin; but if, on the contrary, circumstances threw him in the way of
a new set of ideas, a set of ideas different from the first set, yet
sufficiently near for the same brain to assimilate, then the work
produced by that brain would be endowed with richer colour; or, in
severer form, the idea was, he said, to a work of art what salt is to
meat--it preserved works of art against the corrupting action of time.

How they had talked! how they had discussed things! They had talked
about everything, and she remembered all he s