“It is because of that I wanted to see you,” she said, “because you are the only person, I believe, who can really understand.”

“I think I can, my dear.”

“You have had beautiful dreams, too, that were false ones?”

“It isn’t that the dreams are false,” he replied, “but that the stuff of this earth isn’t the kind to grow illusions.  They must either wither in the bud or be wrenched up root and branch.”

“And there’s only the ugly reality, after all?”

“There’s only the reality, but it isn’t ugly when one grows accustomed to it.  You’ll find it good enough for you yet, my child.”

“No—­no,” she said, “I’ve always lived on pretty lies, I see that now—­I’ve always had to find an outlet for my imagination, however false.  My poetry was never more than this—­it was all quotation—­all a reflection of the things I had wanted to feel in life.  I never wrote a sincere line,” she added.

He pressed her hand—­it was his way of showing that he loved her none the less because she was not a poet—­and then as the unnatural wanness overspread her face, he went out softly, leaving her in Gerty’s care.  By different roads they had come at last to the same place in life—­she with her blighted youth and he with his beautiful old age and his disappointed hopes.

With the beginning of the year Gerty went South with her, but the soft air or the cold made little difference to Laura, when, as she said, she could feel neither.  There had been no outburst of grief; since the night when she had wept on Gerty’s bosom, she had not shed a tear; and once when Gerty had alluded to Kemper in her hearing, she had listened with the polite attention she might have bestowed upon the name of a stranger.  At Gerty’s bidding she came or went, admired or disapproved, but of her old impulsive energy there was so little left that Gerty sometimes wondered if her friend had really, as she insisted, “turned to stone.”  For Laura’s face even had frozen until it wore the impassive smile of a statue, and there was in her movements and her voice something of the insensibility of extreme old age.  She was no longer young, nor was she middle-aged; it was as if she had outlived, not only the emotions, but the years of life.

In April they came back again, and on the morning after their return Gerty paid a dejected visit to Adams in his office.

“I can do nothing with her—­she’s turned to stone,” she said.

“Oh, she’ll come alive again,” he responded.  “Where is she?”

“In Gramercy Park.  It makes no difference to her now where she is, nor whether she sees Mrs. Payne or not.  She even sits for hours and listens to Uncle Percival play upon his flute.”

“It will be the death of her,” he answered gravely.  “Is there nothing we can do?”

“Nothing.  I’ve done everything—­she’s really stone.”

“Well, we’ll bring her round,” said Adams cheerfully; but when he saw Laura herself in the afternoon, he instinctively turned his eyes away from the frozen sweetness in her look.  He was aware that she made an effort to be pleasant, but her pleasantness reminded him of an artificial light on a figure of snow.