She was dry-eyed, almost joyful in this.

"Yes, yes," hurried Gerald, consolingly; "that's what you must always think of--that and not the other things. You must lay hold of that thought and feel rich in it. But hear me, dear friend--me, trying to suggest ways to you of being brave and cheerful! You, who do from G.o.d-given temperament what I can only see as a right aim of aspiration, by light of a certain philosophy arrived at in my own way, through my own experiences. Philosophy is not the right word, either; the feeling I have is mainly esthetic. In order not to be too unhappy in this world, in order to have a little serenity, we must forgive everything, Aurora; that is what I have clearly seen. It's the only way. We must forgive events just as we forgive persons. And we must love life. I who so much of the time hate life, yet know better. We must love it as we must love our enemies. The wherefore is a mystery, but peace of heart and beauty of life are involved with doing it. We mustn't mind being wounded, crucified. We mustn't mind anything, Aurora! We mustn't be angry, the gestures of it are ugly. I, who am always being angry, who sometimes groan aloud my thoughts are so blasphemously bitter, I am telling you what I at bottom know. The game is so unfair, it calls for magnanimity on our part to stake handsomely and lose patiently. Patience, that's it!

We must be patient--patient as a cab-horse! Pride and dignity demand that we be patient, absolutely. For the sake of certain beautiful things and sweet people in the world, we must give it a good name. But hear me!

Hear me giving counsels to you--you who without formulating these ideas act on them, whilst with me they are things which I see as fit to be done but can never hope to do."

"You, too, Gerald, poor boy," was Aurora's simple reply--"you, too, have had lots to try you."

He swept aside by a gesture the subject of his trials, removed it altogether from the horizon, unwilling really that the interest be shifted from her to him. She was equally determined, now that he had sympathized with her, to sympathize with him.

"I know you have," she insisted; "I know you've had lots to try you, just as you knew that I'd had lots. And you're so high-strung, so sensitive ... I never knew anybody like you. But there are good times coming for you; I'm sure of it."

"I don't in the least expect them." He laughed a little harshly. He had winced at her description of him as sensitive, high-strung. "Dear incurable optimist, I don't in the least expect them. It's not because there will be compensation that I hold it the decentest thing to put up with the _mechancetes_ of fate, fate's ingenious stabs in the tender, as they come, without giving the exhibition of one's vulnerability, or poisoning one's system with hate!"

"But there will," she continued to insist, "there will be compensations.

I know it just as well.... You have so much talent, it's perfectly wonderful, and it's only a question of time your having the success you deserve. I, of course, am not educated up to your paintings, but even I am beginning to see something more than I did at first. I can see, for instance, that almost any fine painter, with a command of his colors, could have done the picture down-stairs, but that only you in the whole world could have done this one here. But, I say again, my opinion isn't worth anything. But there's Leslie, who knows all about art and such things, doesn't she? Well, she 's told me how wonderful you are. From what she's told me I'm perfectly sure you'll make your mark in the world."

Again Gerald swept her words aside like noxious obscuring cobwebs. "What is, few know, and what will be, n.o.body knows whatever," he said. "But of all things, I beg, I beg you will not think of me as a misunderstood genius! Art is not a pa.s.sion with me, it is--an interest. And don't hold out for a lure that will reconcile me, my dear friend, anything so vulgar as success! The single hope I have, when I am the most hopeful, is that simply my metal, my resistance, may never quite fail. I shall not have success, dear lady, though in your kindness you predict it. I shall go on and on seeing with different eyes from other people, carving my cherry-stones in my own way, and made unsociable by the failure of others to see how superior my way is. I shall go on growing more eccentric and solitary, and call myself lucky quite beyond my merits if those particular snares which the devil Melancholy sets for the solitary may be escaped, that I may neither drink, nor drug myself, nor shoot myself, nor marry the cook!"

"Don't talk like that, Gerald!" cried Aurora. "Don't say anything so awful! Now keep still while I talk, listen while I tell you. You're going on painting in your own way, but some one--see?--some one is going to arise bright enough to recognize how perfectly wonderful your pictures are. Keep still. You mustn't despise success, you know, success is what everybody needs and wants. You're going to succeed. Keep still.

Stupid people will want to buy your pictures because the people who know about such things have told the public how wonderful they are. Then you'll grow rich and famous. You won't be either eccentric or solitary.

You'll have hosts of admiring friends. I guess you could have them now, if you wanted to. You won't be melancholy. You'll be happy. In your home there will be a nice wife. Why are you supposing you'll never marry? A dear true beautiful girl who thinks the world of you and that you think the world of. And when you're an old gentleman with your grandchildren playing at your knee, you'll say to yourself, 'Aurora told me so!'"

She was all cheering smiles and dimples again.

"Be sure you remember now," she said, holding up a finger and shaking it to mark her bidding, "to say to yourself, 'Aurora told me so!'"

It was a pity almost that Gerald should not have gone home at that point. He would have left with undividedly fond and approving feelings; he would have left tied to Aurora by a thousand sweet humanities in common, as well as impressed afresh by the depth and mysteriousness of woman. But he had either forgotten or was disregarding the hour--the clock on the mantelpiece, like most ornamental clocks, was not going; the bliss of being warm for the first time in days, warm through and through, warm to the middle of his heart, made him careless of correctness; and so he stayed on, to be rudely jarred by and by out of his contentment, and take with him finally into the night a renewed, even sharpened, perception of those exasperating faults which made Mrs.

Hawthorne, as he named it, impossible.

Because they seemed to be on such solid terms of friendship after the long evening before the fire, when they had sorrowed together and sympathized; when he had been permitted to hold and press her hands; when with a veritable mutual outgoing of the heart they had vied in prophesying for each other fair and happy days, Gerald found the boldness--and found it without much strain--the boldness to utter a request which had burned on his lips before, but which he had repressed, saying to himself that what Mrs. Hawthorne did was no affair of his.

"Aurora," he said--she was after this evening Mrs. Hawthorne to him only in the hearing of others,--"Aurora, I want to ask a favor, a great favor."

"Go ahead. I guess it's granted."

"I wish I felt sure; but I'm afraid. Say you will not take part in the amateur variety show at _mi-careme_."

"Sakes!" cried Aurora, staring at him with round eyes. "Ask me something easy! Ask me something else! I can't do that."

"You can. Of course you can, if you wish to. You have only to give some excuse."

"An excuse? Not for a farm! I don't want to. I've bound myself. They expect me as much as anything. I couldn't back out. It's so near the time, too. Why, it's to make money for the Convalescents' Home. I'm a big feature of the show."

"I know you are, and I have a perfect horror of what you may do. I can't bear to think of the public sitting there gaping at you and laughing."

"The public will be composed of friends. It's all private. Give it up?

Not much! I tell you, it's nuts to me! I expect to have lots of fun.

You've never seen, Geraldino, how funny I can be. You'll see that night."

"The voice runs that you're going to appear as a n.i.g.g.e.r mammy and sing plantation songs."

"Oh, does it? Well, that seems innocent. What objection do you see to that?"

"I did not call my request reasonable, dearest Aurora. I begged a personal favor. You know the sort of nerves I have. It is like pouring acid on them to think of you making a show of yourself."

She laughed, but would not yield; she treated his proposition like a spoiled child's demand for the moon, and, after condescending to tease like a boy, he woke suddenly to the fact of being ridiculous. He dropped the subject with the abruptness that causes the opponent nearly to topple over in surprise.

He had sat for a long moment in silence when, realizing that this appeared ill-humored and a piece of effrontery, he started in haste to talk again, choosing the first subject that came into his mind, which was a thing he had meant to tell Aurora this evening, but had not remembered until this moment. The wide distance between the subject he dropped and the subject he took up would show, it was hoped, how definitely he washed his hands of her doings.

"If you have wished for revenge on our friend Antonia," he said, "you can be satisfied. She is in the most singular sort of difficulty."

"Oh, is she? I'm sorry," said Aurora. "Bless you! I never wished her any harm."

"I went to see her yesterday. I had saved up my grievance and felt the need to lay it before her. I think one should give an old friend who has behaved badly the chance to make reparation, don't you? After being angry as you saw me, I yet did not want to break with her. She was very kind to me when I was young. At the same time I could not let her rudeness to you pa.s.s. But I found her in such trouble already when I went to see her yesterday that I said not one word of my grievance. It will have to wait."

"You needn't think you must pick her up on my account. I don't care. But what was the matter?"

"Two of her oldest friends, through an unaccountable mistake, turned into enemies. Both insist that under cover of a mask at the last _veglione_ she insulted them. Unfortunately, her best friends are not kept by their actual knowledge of her from thinking it just possible she might desire to amuse herself with getting a claw into them. She has more than once given offense to her friends by putting them into her books. But Antonia swore to me that she was innocent, and begged me to convince De Breze. The villa she lives in is his property, and he has requested her to vacate it. The other aggrieved one, General Costanzi, she fears may succeed in preventing the publication of her next novel by threat of a libel suit."

"Well, that sounds bad. But what do they say she's done?"

"The poor woman doesn't even know what she is supposed to have said; insulted them is all she can gather. Both maintain that though she tried to alter her voice they recognized her, and will not accept her word for it that she wore no such disguise as they describe. Which reminds me that the offender, or the offender's double, for I have an idea there were two masked alike, came into your box early in the evening with a companion. You have not forgotten--that black domino with the crow's beak?"

Aurora jumped on her seat with a cry of "Goodness gracious!"

"What is it?" he asked, looking at her more attentively. She appeared aghast.

She did not answer at once, tensely trying to think.

"Well," she finally exclaimed, relaxing into limpness, "I've been and gone and done it!"

And as he waited--

"I guess I did that insulting," she added, and wiped her brow.

He thought for a moment that she might be acting out a joke, but in the next accepted her perturbation as genuine.

"Can't you see through it even now I've told you?" she asked.

He shook his head.

"Did you suppose I didn't really know those two who came into the box, the one who roared and the one who cawed? Well, I'm a better actress than I supposed."

"But--"

"And did you really suppose I was going home to bed just as the fun was at its height? There again you're simpler than I thought. Land! Don't I wish now that I had gone home!"

"And you--"