“Why is it impossible?” repeated the voice, catching up the cue.  And then, from that point, the dialogue began afresh.

“Because this, and because that, and because the other—­in short, because I am Lancelot and she is merely Mary Ann.”

“But she is not merely Mary Ann any longer,” urged the voice.

“Yes, for all her money, she is merely Mary Ann.  And am I to sell myself for her money—­I who have stood out so nobly, so high-mindedly, through all these years of privation and struggle?  And her money is all in dollars.  Pah!  I smell the oil.  Struck ile!  Of all things in the world, her brother should just go and strike ile!” A great shudder traversed his form.  “Everything seems to have been arranged out of pure cussedness, just to spite me.  She would have been happier without the money, poor child—­without the money, but with me.  What will she do with all her riches?  She will only be wretched—­like me.”

“Then why not be happy together?”

“Impossible.”

“Why is it impossible?”

“Because her dollars would stick in my throat—­the oil would make me sick.  And what would Peter say, and my brother (not that I care what he says), and my acquaintances?”

“What does that matter to you?  While you were a dead leaf nobody bothered to talk about you; they let you starve—­you, with your genius—­now you can let them talk—­you, with your heiress.  Five hundred thousand pounds.  More than you will make with all your operas if you live a century.  Fifteen thousand a year.  Why, you could have all your works performed at your own expense, and for your own sole pleasure if you chose, as the King of Bavaria listened to Wagner’s operas.  You could devote your life to the highest art—­nay, is it not a duty you owe to the world?  Would it not be a crime against the future to draggle your wings with sordid cares, to sink to lower aims by refusing this Heaven-sent boon?”

The thought clung to him.  He rose and laid out heaps of muddled manuscript—­opera disjecta—­and turned their pages.

“Yes—­yes—­give us life!” they seemed to cry to him.  “We are dead drops of ink, wake us to life and beauty.  How much longer are we to lie here, dusty in death?  We have waited so patiently—­have pity on us, raise us up from our silent tomb, and we will fly abroad through the whole earth, chanting your glory; yea, the world shall be filled to eternity with the echoes of our music and the splendour of your name.”

But he shook his head and sighed, and put them back in their niches, and placed the comic opera he had begun in the centre of the table.

“There lie the only dollars that will ever come my way,” he said aloud.  And, humming the opening bars of a lively polka from the manuscript, he took up his pen and added a few notes.  Then he paused; the polka would not come—­the other voice was louder.

“It would be a degradation,” he repeated, to silence it.  “It would be merely for her money.  I don’t love her.”