ienced too much, felt too much. I've
ceased to take things on trust. Like the youth and the key flower I've
forgotten the best." The voice paused, but the eyes still kept to the
canvas.

"That picture," he went on, "typifies it all. I painted it, not because
I'm an artist, but because in a fashion it expresses something I
couldn't put into words, or express in any other way. When I began to
climb, the object above me was not happiness but ambition. Wealth and
social place, as you say, I already had. They meant nothing to me. What
I wanted was to make a name in another way--as a literary man." The dark
eyes shifted back to the listener's face, the voice spoke more rapidly.

"I went after the thing that I wanted with all the power and tenacity
that was in me. I worked with the one object in view; worked without
resting, feverishly. I had successes and failures, failures and
successes--a long line of both. At last, as the world puts it, I
_arrived_. I got to a position where everything I wrote sold, and sold
well; but in the meantime the thing above me, which had been ambition,
gradually took on another shape. Perfection it was I longed for now,
perfection in my art. It was not enough that the public had accepted me
as I was; I was not satisfied with my work. Try as I might, nothing that
I wrote ever reached my own standard in its execution. I worked harder
than ever; but it was useless. I was confronting the blank wall--the
wall of my natural limitations."

The voice paused, and for a moment lowered. "I won't say what I did
then; I was--mad almost--the finger-marks of it are on the rock."

The girl could not look longer into the speaker's eyes. She felt as if
she were gazing upon a naked human soul, and turned away.

"At last," he went on in his confession, "I came to myself, and was
forced to see things as they were. I saw that as well as I thought I had
understood life I had not even grasped its meaning. I had fancied the
attainment of my object the supreme end, and by every human standard I
had succeeded in my purpose; but the thing I had gained was trash.
Wealth, power, notoriety--what were they? Bubbles, nothing more; bubbles
that broke in the hand of him who clasped them. The real meaning and
object of existence lay deeper, and had nothing whatever to do with the
estimate of a person by his fellows. It was a frame of mind of the
individual himself."

Florence's face turned farther away, but Sidwell did not not