But he was disappointed.  Her criticism was just.  He acknowledged that, but he had a feeling that he was not sharing his work with her for the purpose of schoolroom correction.  The details did not matter.  They could take care of themselves.  He could mend them, he could learn to mend them.  Out of life he had captured something big and attempted to imprison it in the story.  It was the big thing out of life he had read to her, not sentence-structure and semicolons.  He wanted her to feel with him this big thing that was his, that he had seen with his own eyes, grappled with his own brain, and placed there on the page with his own hands in printed words.  Well, he had failed, was his secret decision.  Perhaps the editors were right.  He had felt the big thing, but he had failed to transmute it.  He concealed his disappointment, and joined so easily with her in her criticism that she did not realize that deep down in him was running a strong undercurrent of disagreement.

“This next thing I’ve called ’The Pot’,” he said, unfolding the manuscript.  “It has been refused by four or five magazines now, but still I think it is good.  In fact, I don’t know what to think of it, except that I’ve caught something there.  Maybe it won’t affect you as it does me.  It’s a short thing—­only two thousand words.”

“How dreadful!” she cried, when he had finished.  “It is horrible, unutterably horrible!”

He noted her pale face, her eyes wide and tense, and her clenched hands, with secret satisfaction.  He had succeeded.  He had communicated the stuff of fancy and feeling from out of his brain.  It had struck home.  No matter whether she liked it or not, it had gripped her and mastered her, made her sit there and listen and forget details.

“It is life,” he said, “and life is not always beautiful.  And yet, perhaps because I am strangely made, I find something beautiful there.  It seems to me that the beauty is tenfold enhanced because it is there—­”

“But why couldn’t the poor woman—­” she broke in disconnectedly.  Then she left the revolt of her thought unexpressed to cry out:  “Oh!  It is degrading!  It is not nice!  It is nasty!”

For the moment it seemed to him that his heart stood still. Nasty!  He had never dreamed it.  He had not meant it.  The whole sketch stood before him in letters of fire, and in such blaze of illumination he sought vainly for nastiness.  Then his heart began to beat again.  He was not guilty.

“Why didn’t you select a nice subject?” she was saying.  “We know there are nasty things in the world, but that is no reason—­”