“That picture,” he went on, “typifies it all.  I painted it, not because I’m an artist, but because in a fashion it expresses something I couldn’t put into words, or express in any other way.  When I began to climb, the object above me was not happiness but ambition.  Wealth and social place, as you say, I already had.  They meant nothing to me.  What I wanted was to make a name in another way—­as a literary man.”  The dark eyes shifted back to the listener’s face, the voice spoke more rapidly.

“I went after the thing that I wanted with all the power and tenacity that was in me.  I worked with the one object in view; worked without resting, feverishly.  I had successes and failures, failures and successes—­a long line of both.  At last, as the world puts it, I arrived.  I got to a position where everything I wrote sold, and sold well; but in the meantime the thing above me, which had been ambition, gradually took on another shape.  Perfection it was I longed for now, perfection in my art.  It was not enough that the public had accepted me as I was; I was not satisfied with my work.  Try as I might, nothing that I wrote ever reached my own standard in its execution.  I worked harder than ever; but it was useless.  I was confronting the blank wall—­the wall of my natural limitations.”

The voice paused, and for a moment lowered.  “I won’t say what I did then; I was—­mad almost—­the finger-marks of it are on the rock.”

The girl could not look longer into the speaker’s eyes.  She felt as if she were gazing upon a naked human soul, and turned away.

“At last,” he went on in his confession, “I came to myself, and was forced to see things as they were.  I saw that as well as I thought I had understood life I had not even grasped its meaning.  I had fancied the attainment of my object the supreme end, and by every human standard I had succeeded in my purpose; but the thing I had gained was trash.  Wealth, power, notoriety—­what were they?  Bubbles, nothing more; bubbles that broke in the hand of him who clasped them.  The real meaning and object of existence lay deeper, and had nothing whatever to do with the estimate of a person by his fellows.  It was a frame of mind of the individual himself.”

Florence’s face turned farther away, but Sidwell did not notice.  “Then, for the last time,” he hurried on, “the unattainable changed form for me, and became what it seems now—­happiness.  For a little time I think I was happy—­happy in merely having made the discovery.  Then came the reaction.  I was as I was, as I am now—­a product of my past life, of a civilization essentially artificial.  In striving for a false ideal I had unfitted myself for the real when at last I discovered it.”