Valerie leaned back against the door, hands clasped behind her, eyebrows bent slightly inward in an unwilling effort to remember.

Finally she said impatiently:  “They don’t know what they’re talking about.  They all say, substantially, the same thing—­”

“What is that thing?”

“Why—­oh, it’s too silly to repeat—­but they say there is nothing lovable about your work—­that it’s inhumanly and coldly perfect—­too—­too—­” she flushed and laughed uncertainly—­“’too damn omniscient’ is what one celebrated man said.  And I could have boxed his large, thin, celebrated ears for him!”

“Go on,” he nodded; “what else do they say?”

“Nothing.  That’s all they can find to say—­all they dare say.  You know what they are—­what other men are—­and some of the younger girls, too.  Not that I don’t like them—­and they are very sweet to me—­only they’re not like you—­”

“They’re more human.  Is that it, Valerie?”

“No, I don’t mean that!”

“Yes, you do.  You mean that the others take life in a perfectly human manner—­find enjoyment, amusement in each other, in a hundred things outside of their work.  They act like men and women, not like a painting machine; if they experience impulses and emotions they don’t entirely stifle ’em.  They have time and leisure to foregather, laugh, be silly, discuss, banter, flirt, make love, and cut up all the various harmless capers that humanity is heir to. That’s what you mean, but you don’t realise it.  And you think, and they think, that my solemn and owlish self-suppression is drying me up, squeezing out of me the essence of that warm, lovable humanity in which, they say, my work is deficient.  They say, too, that my inspiration is lacking in that it is not founded on personal experience; that I have never known any deep emotion, any suffering, any of the sterner, darker regrets—­anything of that passion which I sometimes depict.  They say that the personal and convincing element is totally absent because I have not lived”—­he laughed—­“and loved; that my work lacks the one thing which only the self-knowledge of great happiness and great pain can lend to it....  And—­I think they are right, Valerie.  What do you think?”

The girl stood silent, with lowered eyes, reflecting for a moment.  Then she looked up curiously.

“Have you never been very unhappy?”

“I had a toothache once.”

She said, unsmiling:  “Haven’t you ever suffered mentally?”

“No—­not seriously.  Oh, I’ve regretted little secret meannesses—­bad temper, jealousy—­”

“Nothing else?  Have you never experienced deep unhappiness—­through death, for example?”

“No, thank God.  My father and mother and sister are living....  It is rather strange,” he added, partly to himself, “that the usual troubles and sorrows have so far passed me by.  I am twenty-seven; there has never been a death in my family, or among my intimate friends.”