You stayed with me, and
slowly, surely, the creative urge went out of your life."
"But what on earth could you find in my poor art to attract you? What
were my pictures to you?"
"I needed them, I needed you. It was a certain something, a rich colour
effect, perhaps. And then, under your very eyes, the colour that
vanished from your canvases reappeared in my prose. My style became more
luxurious than it had been, while you tortured your soul in the vain
attempt of calling back to your brush what was irretrievably lost."
"Why did you not tell me?"
"You would have laughed in my face, and I could not have endured your
laugh. Besides, I always hoped, until it was too late, that I might yet
check the mysterious power within me. Soon, however, I became aware that
it was beyond my control. The unknown god, whose instrument I am, had
wisely made it stronger than me."
"But why," retorted Ethel, "was it necessary to discard me, like a
cast-off garment, like a wanton who has lost the power to please?"
Her frame shook with the remembered emotion of that moment, when years
ago he had politely told her that she was nothing to him.
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