The energetic woman judged from a too narrow basis.  Because Mavick was weak—­and she had always secretly despised him for yielding to her—­weak as compared with her own indomitable spirit, she generalized wildly.  Her opinion of men would have been modified if she had come in contact with Murad Ault.

To one man in New York besides Mr. Ault the failure did not seem a personal calamity.  When Philip saw in the steamer departures the name of Lord Montague, his spirits rose in spite of the thought that the heiress was no longer an heiress.  The sky lifted, there was a promise of fair weather, the storm, for him, had indeed cleared the air.

“Dear Philip,” wrote Miss McDonald, “it is really dreadful news, but I cannot be so very downhearted.  It is the least of calamities that could happen to my dear child.  Didn’t I tell you that it is always darkest just before the dawn?”

And Philip needed the hope of the dawn.  Trial is good for any one, but hopeless suffering for none.  Philip had not been without hope, but it was a visionary indulgence, against all evidence.  It was the hope of youth, not of reason.  He stuck to his business doggedly, he stuck to his writing doggedly, but over all his mind was a cloud, an oppression not favorable to creative effort—­that is, creative effort sweet and not cynical, sunny and not morbid.

And yet, who shall say that this very experience, this oppression of circumstance, was not the thing needed for the development of the best that was in him?  Thrown back upon himself and denied an airy soaring in the heights of a prosperous fancy, he had come to know himself and his limitations.  And in the year he had learned a great deal about his art.  For one thing he had come to the ground.  He was looking more at life as it is.  His experience at the publishers had taught him one important truth, and that is that a big subject does not make a big writer, that all that any mind can contribute to the general thought of the world in literature is what is in itself, and if there is nothing in himself it is vain for the writer to go far afield for a theme.  He had seen the young artists, fretting for want of subjects, wandering the world over in search of an object fitted to their genius, setting up their easels in front of the marvels of nature and of art, in the expectation that genius would descend upon them.

If they could find something big enough to paint!  And he had seen, in exhibition after exhibition, that the artist who cannot paint a rail-fence cannot paint a pyramid.  A man does not become a good rider by mounting an elephant; ten to one a donkey would suit him better.  Philip had begun to see that the life around him had elements enough of the comic and the tragic to give full play to all his powers.

He began to observe human beings as he had never done before.  There were only two questions, and they are at the bottom of all creative literature—­could he see them, could he make others see them?