sh
her."

"I only had the pleasure of seeing your aunt once. I should have thought
her a quite uncrushable person. But she would be sure to help you."

"I couldn't show her anything. She'd think them even sillier than they
are."

"Always running yourself down! There speaks the artist!"

"I'm not modest," he said anxiously. "I just know they're bad."

Mr. Pembroke's teeth were clear of meringue, and he could refrain no
longer. "My dear Rickie, your father and mother are dead, and you often
say your aunt takes no interest in you. Therefore your life depends on
yourself. Think it over carefully, but settle, and having once settled,
stick. If you think that this writing is practicable, and that you
could make your living by it--that you could, if needs be, support a
wife--then by all means write. But you must work. Work and drudge. Begin
at the bottom of the ladder and work upwards."

Rickie's head drooped. Any metaphor silenced him. He never thought of
replying that art is not a ladder--with a curate, as it were, on the
first rung, a rector on the second, and a bishop, still nearer heaven,
at the top. He never retorted that the artist is not a bricklayer at
all, but a horseman, whose business it is to catch Pegasus at once,
not to practise for him by mounting tamer colts. This is hard, hot, and
generally ungraceful work, but it is not drudgery. For drudgery is not
art, and cannot lead to it.

"Of course I don't really think about writing," he said, as he poured
the cold water into the coffee. "Even if my things ever were decent, I
don't think the magazines would take them, and the magazines are one's
only chance. I read somewhere, too, that Marie Corelli's about the only
person who makes a thing out of literature. I'm certain it wouldn't pay
me."

"I never mentioned the word 'pay,'" said Mr. Pembroke uneasily.

"You must not consider money. There are ideals too."

"I have no ideals."

"Rickie!" she exclaimed. "Horrible boy!"

"No, Agnes, I have no ideals." Then he got very red, for it was a phrase
he had caught from Ansell, and he could not remember what came next.

"The person who has no ideals," she exclaimed, "is to be pitied."

"I think so too," said Mr. Pembroke, sipping his coffee. "Life without
an ideal would be like the sky without the sun."

Rickie looked towards the night, wherein there now twinkled innumerable
stars--gods and heroes, virgins and brides, to whom the Greeks have
given their name