and
despite the difficulty of getting across to it, really a good deal more
accessible. The west side was one unbroken glow of light and though the
Christmas crowds had thinned somewhat with the closing of the shops,
they were still thick enough to have made it difficult for two people to
walk and talk together. A quadruple stream of motors, bellowing warnings
at one another, roaring with suddenly opened throttles, squealing under
sudden applications of the brake, occupied the roadway and served more
than the mere distance would have done, to isolate the pair that had the
east sidewalk all to themselves.

He couldn't be looking for a better place to talk than this, Rose
thought. Why didn't he begin? Probably he'd got started thinking about
something else. A motor coming along near the curb emitted a
particularly wanton bellow, and she saw him jump like a nervous woman,
then stand still and glare after the offender. He must be feeling
specially irritable to-night, she thought.

It was a good diagnosis. And his irritation had, for him, a most unusual
cause. Chorus-girls, principals, owners, authors, costumers, were
frequently the objects of his exasperated dissatisfaction. But to-night
the person he was out of all patience with was himself. He couldn't make
up his mind what he wanted to do. Or rather, knowing what he wanted to
do, he couldn't make up his mind to do it. It was this indecision of his
that had produced the silence while he and Rose had stood in the
entrance to Lessing's store. The only resolution he had come to there
had been not to allow her to say good night to him and walk away. But
now that she was striding along beside him, he couldn't make up his mind
what to say to her.

A more self-conscious man would have forgiven himself his indecision
from recognizing the real complexities of the case. He was, to begin
with, an artist--almost a great artist. And a universal characteristic
of such is a complete detachment from the materials in which they
work--a sort of remorselessness in the use of anything that can
contribute to their complete expression. The raw materials of John
Galbraith's art were paint and canvas, fabrics, tunes, men and women. It
was an axiom in his experience, that any personal feeling--any sort of
human relation with one of the units in the mosaic he was building--was
to be avoided like the plague. His professional and personal contempt
for a colleague capable of a love-affair with a