This time Florence took him up quickly. "Because," she answered, "you seem to have everything one can think of that is needed to make a human being happy--wealth, position, health, ability--all the prizes other people work their lives out for or die for." Again the voice dropped. "I can't understand it." She was silent a moment. "I can't understand it," she repeated.
From the girl's face the man's eyes passed to the canvas, and rested there. "Yes," he said slowly, "I suppose it is difficult, almost impossible, for you to realize why I am--as I am. You have never had the personal experience--and we only understand what we have felt. The trouble with me is that I have experienced too much, felt too much. I've ceased to take things on trust. Like the youth and the key flower I've forgotten the best." The voice paused, but the eyes still kept to the canvas.
"That picture," he went on, "typifies it all. I painted it, not because I'm an artist, but because in a fashion it expresses something I couldn't put into words, or express in any other way. When I began to climb, the object above me was not happiness but ambition. Wealth and social place, as you say, I already had. They meant nothing to me. What I wanted was to make a name in another way--as a literary man." The dark eyes shifted back to the listener's face, the voice spoke more rapidly.
"I went after the thing that I wanted with all the power and tenacity that was in me. I worked with the one object in view; worked without resting, feverishly. I had successes and failures, failures and successes--a long line of both. At last, as the world puts it, I arrived. I got to a position where everything I wrote sold, and sold well; but in the meantime the thing above me, which had been ambition, gradually took on another shape. Perfection it was I longed for now, perfection in my art. It was not enough that the public had accepted me as I was; I was not satisfied with my work. Try as I might, nothing that I wrote ever reached my own standard in its execution. I worked harder than ever; but it was useless. I was confronting the blank wall--the wall of my natural limitations."
The voice paused, and for a moment lowered. "I won't say what I did then; I was--mad almost--the finger-marks of it are on the rock."
The girl could not look longer into the speaker's eyes. She felt as if she were gazing upon a naked human soul, and turned away.