“I’m afraid I don’t agree with you.  All the great geniuses have been not only aware of themselves, but most uncommonly certain.”

“Still, their genius may have been the part of themselves they understood least.  If they had tried to understand it, they would have doubted too.”

“There’s something in that.  You mean genius understands everything—­except itself?

“I think that’s what I meant.”

“Yes; but whether genius understands itself or not, whatever it does, you see, it doesn’t doubt.”

“Doesn’t it?  Have you read Keats’ letters? He doubted.”

“Only when he was in love with Fanny Brawne.”

He paused abruptly.  He was seized by an idea, a rushing irresistible idea that lifted him off his feet and whirled him suddenly into a region of light, tumultuous and profound.  Keats was in love when he doubted.  Could that be the explanation of his own misgiving?

“That,” he said hastily, “that’s another thing altogether.  Any way, if you don’t believe in yourself, you’ll have some difficulty in making other people believe in you.”

“And if other people do believe in you, before you believe in yourself?”

“Before?  It might be done before, but not after.  You may make a man conceited, but you can’t give him back the conceit he had on Saturday, if he’s lost it all by Monday.”

“That means that you know you’ve written a beautiful thing and you only think you’ll never write another.”

“Perhaps it does.” (He had to keep it up for the pleasure of hearing her say she believed in him.)

“Well, I don’t suppose you will write another Helen in Leuce.”

“I’m afraid not.”  He went on to tell her that the wonder was how he wrote the thing at all.  It had been done anyhow, anywhere, in successive bursts or spasms of creative energy; the circumstances of his life (he referred to them with some diffidence) not being exactly favourable to sustained effort.  “How did you feel about it?” he inquired.

“I can hardly tell you.  I think I felt as you feel about anything beautiful that comes to you for the first time.  I don’t know what it is you’ve done.  It’s as if something had been done to me, as if I’d been given a new sense.  It’s like hearing Beethoven or Wagner for the first time.”  As she spoke she saw the swift blood grow hot in his face, she saw the slight trembling of the hand that propped his chin and she thought, “Poor fellow, so much emotion for a little praise?”

“What did you mean by it?” she said.

He considered a moment—­as who should say “What the dickens did I mean by it?”