“But you do talk well,” she insisted.  “Just think how you have improved in the short time I have known you.  Mr. Butler is a noted public speaker.  He is always asked by the State Committee to go out on stump during campaign.  Yet you talked just as well as he the other night at dinner.  Only he was more controlled.  You get too excited; but you will get over that with practice.  Why, you would make a good public speaker.  You can go far—­if you want to.  You are masterly.  You can lead men, I am sure, and there is no reason why you should not succeed at anything you set your hand to, just as you have succeeded with grammar.  You would make a good lawyer.  You should shine in politics.  There is nothing to prevent you from making as great a success as Mr. Butler has made.  And minus the dyspepsia,” she added with a smile.

They talked on; she, in her gently persistent way, returning always to the need of thorough grounding in education and to the advantages of Latin as part of the foundation for any career.  She drew her ideal of the successful man, and it was largely in her father’s image, with a few unmistakable lines and touches of color from the image of Mr. Butler.  He listened eagerly, with receptive ears, lying on his back and looking up and joying in each movement of her lips as she talked.  But his brain was not receptive.  There was nothing alluring in the pictures she drew, and he was aware of a dull pain of disappointment and of a sharper ache of love for her.  In all she said there was no mention of his writing, and the manuscripts he had brought to read lay neglected on the ground.

At last, in a pause, he glanced at the sun, measured its height above the horizon, and suggested his manuscripts by picking them up.

“I had forgotten,” she said quickly.  “And I am so anxious to hear.”

He read to her a story, one that he flattered himself was among his very best.  He called it “The Wine of Life,” and the wine of it, that had stolen into his brain when he wrote it, stole into his brain now as he read it.  There was a certain magic in the original conception, and he had adorned it with more magic of phrase and touch.  All the old fire and passion with which he had written it were reborn in him, and he was swayed and swept away so that he was blind and deaf to the faults of it.  But it was not so with Ruth.  Her trained ear detected the weaknesses and exaggerations, the overemphasis of the tyro, and she was instantly aware each time the sentence-rhythm tripped and faltered.  She scarcely noted the rhythm otherwise, except when it became too pompous, at which moments she was disagreeably impressed with its amateurishness.  That was her final judgment on the story as a whole—­amateurish, though she did not tell him so.  Instead, when he had done, she pointed out the minor flaws and said that she liked the story.