“I should think,” answered Helen, thoughtfully, “that it would be much better to earn one’s happiness.”

“Perhaps after you had tried it a while you would not think so,” replied her companion; “that is the artist’s life, you know, and in practice it is generally a very dreadful life.  Real effort is very hard to make; and there is always a new possibility to lure the artist, so that his life is always restless and a cruel defeat.”

“It is such a life that you have lived, Mr. Howard?” asked Helen, gazing at him.

“There are compensations,” he replied, smiling slightly, “or there would be no artists.  There comes to each one who persists some hour of victory, some hour when he catches the tide of his being at the flood, and when he finds himself master of all that his soul contains, and takes a kind of fierce delight in sweeping himself on and in breaking through everything that stands in his way.  You made me think of such things by what you said of your joy in music; only perhaps the artist discovers that not only the streamlets and the winds have motion and meaning, but that the planets also have a word for his soul; and his own being comes suddenly to seem to him a power which it frightens him to know of, and he sees the genius of life as a spirit with eyes of flame.  It lifts him from his feet and drags him away, and the task of his soul takes the form of something that he could cry out to escape.  He has fought his way into the depths of being at last, and lie stands alone in all his littleness on the shore of an ocean whose waves are centuries—­and then even while he is wondering and full of fear, his power begins to die within him and to go he knows not how; and when he looks at himself again he is like a man who has had a dream, and wakened with only the trembling left; except that he knows it was no dream but a fiery reality, and that the memory of it will cast a shadow over all the rest of his days and make them seem trivial and meaningless.  No one knows how many years he may spend in seeking and never find that lost glory again.”

Mr. Howard had been speaking very intensely, and when he stopped Helen did not reply at once, but continued gazing at him.  “What is the use of such moments,” she asked at last, “if they only make one wretched?”

“At least one may keep the memory,” he replied with a smile, “and that gives him a standard of reality.  He learns to be humble, and learns how to judge men and men’s glory, and the wonderful things of men’s world,—­so that while they are the most self-occupied and self-delighted creatures living he may see them as dumb cattle that are grazing while the sunrise is firing the hilltops.”

“You have had such moments yourself?” asked Helen.