“You come very near it,” said Philip, with a smile.  And after a moment the girl broke out again: 

“Materials!  You writers go searching all round for materials, just as painters do, fit for your genius.”

“But don’t you know that the hardest thing to do is the obvious, the thing close to you?”

“I dare say.  But you won’t mind?  It is just an illustration.  I went the other day with mother to Alice’s house.  She was so sort of distant and reserved that I couldn’t know her in the least as I know her now.  And there was the rigid Puritan, her father, representing the Old Testament; and her placid mother, with all the spirit of the New Testament; and then that dear old maiden aunt, representing I don’t know what, maybe a blind attempt through nature and art to escape out of Puritanism; and the typical old frame farmhouse—­why, here is material for the sweetest, most pathetic idyl.  Yes, the Story of Alice.  In another generation people would come long distances to see the valley where Alice lived, and her spirit would pervade it.”

There could be but one end to such a burst of enthusiasm, and both laughed and felt a relief in a merriment that was, after all, sympathetic.  But Evelyn was a persistent creature, and presently she turned to Philip, again with those appealing eyes.

“Now, why don’t you do it?”

Philip hesitated a moment and betrayed some embarrassment under the questioning of the truthful eyes.

“I’ve a good mind to tell you.  I have—­I am writing something.”

“Yes?”

“Not that exactly.  I couldn’t, don’t you see, betray and use my own relatives in that way.”

“Yes, I see that.”

“It isn’t much.  I cannot tell how it will come out.  I tell you—­I don’t mean that I have any right to ask you to keep it as a secret of mine, but it is this way:  If a writer gives away his imagination, his idea, before it is fixed in form on paper, he seems to let the air of all the world upon it and it disappears, and isn’t quite his as it was before to grow in his own mind.”

“I can understand that,” Evelyn replied.

“Well—­” and Philip found himself launched.  It is so easy to talk about one’s self to a sympathetic listener.  He told Evelyn a little about his life, and how the valley used to seem to him as a boy, and how it seemed now that he had had experience of other places and people, and how his studies and reading had enabled him to see things in their proper relations, and how, finally, gradually the idea for a story in this setting had developed in his mind.  And then he sketched in outline the story as he had developed it, and left the misty outlines of its possibilities to the imagination.

The girl listened with absorbing interest, and looked the approval which she did not put in words.  Perhaps she knew that a bud will never come to flower if you pull it in pieces.  When Philip had finished he had a momentary regret for this burst of confidence, which he had never given to any one else.  But in the light of Evelyn’s quick approval and understanding, it was only momentary.  Perhaps neither of them thought what a dangerous game this is, for two young souls to thus unbosom themselves to each other.