“I don’t understand the workings of his mind,” he admitted; “when I took him up his supper he seemed quite different from the half-an-hour earlier when I’d been up.  He’d—­it’s difficult to describe it—­but it was as though he’d adjusted the whole incident in his own mind to what he wanted it to be.  He greeted me with a sort of forgiving and yet chastened dignity that made me nearly howl with laughter.  He sat up there in his bed as though he were upon a throne and expecting me to beg for pardon, or, rather, as though he knew I wouldn’t, but he had the happy consciousness that I ought to.  It was confoundingly annoying.  I asked him whether he wanted to see Miss Barlow to say good-night—­you know the passionate devotion he’s had for her of late—­and all he said was, ’No, thank you; he didn’t think he could trust himself to speak to her just yet!’ I said, ‘Don’t be a little idiot,’ and he only smiled in a long-suffering manner, and I came away feeling squashed by my own small son.”

“He sounds as though he were going to suffer from what is called the artistic temperament,” observed the Parson.

“Let’s hope not,” chimed in Killigrew, “because the so-called artistic temperament is never found among the people who do things, but only in the lookers-on.  The actual creators don’t suffer from it.”

“It depends what one means by the artistic temperament,” said Judy rather soberly.  “If you mean the untidy emotional sort of people who excuse everything by saying they have the artistic temperament, I agree with you.  That’s what the Philistine thinks it is, of course.”

“Oh, the real thing, the thing that creates, is nothing in the world but a fusion of sex,” said Killigrew swiftly.  “It gives to the man intuition and to the woman creativeness—­it adds a sixth sense, feminising the man and giving the woman what is generally a masculine attribute.  But that’s not what the Padre means.  He’s using the word in its accepted derogatory sense.”

“I don’t think he is quite, either,” said Judy.  “I think what you mean is more the deadly literary sense, isn’t it, Padre?—­the thing some people are cursed with, the voice that gets up and lies down with them, that keeps up a running commentary on whatever they do.  The creative people can suffer from that.”

“You mean the thing I always had as a youngster,” said Killigrew.  “If I went fishing I used to hear something like this:  ’The boy slipped to the bank with the swift sureness of a young animal, and sat with long brown legs in the water while his skilful fingers fixed the bait on the hook.’”

“That’s the sort of thing,” said Judith.  “It’s deadly dangerous.”

“Don’t you think I’ve grown out of it, then?” asked Killigrew quickly, but with a laugh.  Judy did not reply, but turned to Ishmael.

“Don’t you know at all what I mean?” she asked.  “You must have had moments like that—­every child has.  Some people let it grow into a habit—­that’s what’s fatal.”