“Is—­Is that your faith, Alison?” he demanded.  “God forbid!  You have come to a man who also has confessions to make.”

“Oh, I am glad.  I want to know all of you—­all, do you understand?  That will bring us even closer together.  And it was one thing I felt about you in the beginning, that day in the garden, that you had had much to conquer—­more than most men.  It was a part of your force and of your knowledge of life.  You were not a sexless ascetic who preached a mere neutral goodness.  Does that shock you?”

He smiled in turn.

“I went away from here, as I once told you, full of a high resolution not to trail the honour of my art—­if I achieved art—­in the dust.  But I have not only trailed my art—­I trailed myself.  In New York I became contaminated, —­the poison of the place, of the people with whom I came in contact, got into my blood.  Little by little I yielded—­I wanted so to succeed, to be able to confound those who had doubted and ridiculed me!  I wasn’t content to wait to deny myself for the ideal.  Success was in the air.  That was the poison, and I only began to realize it after it was too late.

“Please don’t think I am asking pity—­I feel that you must know.  From the very first my success—­which was really failure—­began to come in the wrong way.  As my father’s daughter I could not be obscure.  I was sought out, I was what was called picturesque, I suppose.  The women petted me, although some of them hated me, and I had a fascination for a certain kind of men—­the wrong kind.  I began going to dinners, house parties, to recognize, that advantages came that way . . . .  It seemed quite natural.  It was what many others of my profession tried to do, and they envied me my opportunities.

“I ought to say, in justice to myself, that I was not in the least cynical about it.  I believed I was clinging to the ideal of art, and that all I wanted was a chance.  And the people I went with had the same characteristics, only intensified, as those I had known here.  Of course I was actually no better than the women who were striving frivolously to get away from themselves, and the men who were fighting to get money.  Only I didn’t know it.

“Well, my chance came at last.  I had done several little things, when an elderly man who is tremendously rich, whose name you would recognize if I mentioned it, gave me an order.  For weeks, nearly every day, he came to my studio for tea, to talk over the plans.  I was really unsophisticated then—­but I can see now—­well, that the garden was a secondary consideration . . . .  And the fact that I did it for him gave me a standing I should not otherwise have had . . . .  Oh, it is sickening to look back upon, to think what an idiot I was in how little I saw....