“No,” said Mr. Howard, with a slight smile, “I had not that thought in my mind.  I have seen too much of the reality of life to trouble myself or the the world with vanity of that very crude kind; I can sometimes imagine myself being proud of my serenity, but that is one step beyond at any rate.  A man who lives in his soul very seldom thinks of himself in an external way; when I look in the glass it is generally to think how strange it is that this form of mine should be that which represents me to men, and I cannot find anything they might really learn about me, except the one physical fact of suffering.”

“They can certainly not fail to learn that,” said the other.

“Yes,” replied Mr. Howard sadly, “I know, if any man does, what it is to earn one’s life by suffering and labor.  That is why I have so mastering a sense of life’s preciousness, and why I cannot reconcile myself to this dreadful fact of wealth.  It is the same thing, too, that makes me feel so keenly about this girl and her beauty, and keeps her in my thoughts.  I don’t think I could tell you how the sight of her affected me, unless you knew how I have lived all these lonely years.  For I have had no friends and no strength for any of the world’s work, and all my battle has been with my own soul, to be brave and to keep my self-command through all my trials; I think my illness has acted as a kind of nervous stimulus upon me, as if it were only by laboring to dwell upon the heights of my being night and day that I could have strength to stand against despair.  The result is that I have lived for days in a kind of frenzy of effort, with all my faculties at white heat; and it has always been the artist’s life, it has always been beauty that brought me the joy that I needed, and given me the strength to go on.  Beauty is the sign of victory, and the prize of it, in this heart’s battle; the more I have suffered and labored, the more keenly I have come to feel that, until the commonest flower has a song for me.  And William, the time I saw this girl she wore a rose in her hair, but she was so perfect that I scarcely saw the flower; there is that in a man’s heart which makes it that to him the fairest and most sacred of God’s creatures must always be the maiden.  When I was young, I walked about the earth half drunk with a dream of love; and even now, when I am twice as old as my years, and burnt out and dying, I could not but start when I saw this girl.  For I fancied that she must carry about in that maiden’s heart of hers some high notion of what she meant in the world, and what was due to her.  When a man gazes upon beauty such as hers, there is a feeling that comes to him that is quite unutterable, a feeling born of all the weakness and failure and sin of his lifetime.  For every true man’s life is a failure; and this is the vision that he sought with so much pain, the thing that might have been, had he kept the faith with his own genius.  It is so that beauty is