He was alone with Lucia Harden.

It was one thing to be alone with Lucia Harden in the library or on Harcombe Moor, and quite another thing to be left with her in that lamp-lit, fire-lit room.  The library belonged to her race and to their historic past; the moor to nature and to all time; this room to her and to the burning present.  There was no sign or suggestion of another presence.

A kindly room (barring that parquet floor!); a beautiful room; full of warm lights, and broad and pleasing shadows; furnished with an extreme simplicity, such bareness as musicians love.  He was struck by that absence of all trivial decoration, all disturbing and irrelevant detail.  In such a room, the divinity of the human form was not dwarfed or obscured by excess of furniture.  Such a room, he reflected, was also eminently disadvantageous to any figure that was not entirely sure of its divinity.  But for two persons who desired to know each other better there couldn’t be a better place.  It left them so securely, so intimately alone.

For the first time, then, he was alone with Lucia Harden.

She had risen and had unlocked a drawer in the writing-table near her, and taken out the thick pile of manuscript.  He noticed that she detached from it some loose pencilled sheets and put them back into the drawer.  She seated herself in her old place and signed to him to take the low chair beside her.

He approached her (for the first time) without nervousness or embarrassment; for he saw his Helen lying on her knees and knew that she held his dreams in her soul.  He had made her acquainted with the best and highest in him, and she would judge him by that alone.  In her sight his genius would stand apart from all in him that was jarring and obscure.  It at least was untouched by the accident of his birth, the baseness of his false position.

“I sent for you,” said she, “because I wanted to talk to you about this, while it is all fresh in my mind.  I thought we could talk better here.”

“Thanks.  I want awfully to know what you have to say.”

“I can’t have anything to say that you don’t know already.”

“I—­I know nothing.” (What a hypocrite he felt as he said it!)

“Nor I. As far as knowledge goes I haven’t any right to speak.  Only—­the other evening, you expressed such absolute disbelief in yourself—­”

“I was perfectly sincere.”

“I know you were.  That’s what made me believe in you.”

(Well then, if that was what made her believe in him he would continue to express disbelief in himself.)

She paused.  “It’s the little men, isn’t it, the men of talent, that are always so self-conscious and so sure?  I don’t know much about it, but it seems to me that genius isn’t bound to be like that.  It might be so different from your ordinary self that you couldn’t be aware of it in the ordinary way.  There would always be a sort of divine uncertainty about it.”