"Can you?"

"Yes--I think so."

"And be quite as happy as before?"

"Oh, I am not prophet enough for that. I can never be unhappy while I have you."

"And I could never be happy if I let you kill a gift that is as living a part of yourself as your sense of vision or touch. Do you suppose I ever deluded myself with the dream that you would settle down into the domestic routine of years--write political pamphlets for Hunsdon? I knew this would come and I never have had a misgiving. I know you can write without stimulant. Nothing can be more fanciful than that the highest of all mental gifts must have artificial aid. That may be the need of the little man driving a pen for his daily bread, of the small talent trying to create, but never for you!"

"There is some strange congenital want. I am certain of it. And if I gave way, Anne, I should be a madman for days, perhaps weeks--a beast--oh, you have not the faintest suspicion; and all I am living for in the wretched present is that you never may."

"I do not believe in permanent congenital weaknesses with a free rich faculty like yours. I know how that fatal idea has wedged itself in your brain--but if you try--if you persist--you will overcome it. Promise me that you will try."

"You are so strong," he said sadly. "You cannot conceive, with all your own imagination, the miserable weaknesses of the still half-developed human brain. The greatest scientific minds that have spent their lives in the study of the brain know next to nothing about it. How should you, dear child? I know the curse that is the other half of my gift to write, but of its cause, its meaning, I know nothing. You are strong by instinct, but you have not the least idea why or how you are strong. It is all a mysterious arrangement of particles."

"But that is no reason one should not strive to overcome weakness."

"Certainly not. But I have so much at stake that I think it wisest to kill the temptation outright, and not tempt providence by dallying with it. And this regarding the arbitrary exercise of the imagination: It is the small people of whom you spoke just now who are the slaves of what little imagination they have, who can make themselves ill or sometimes well under its influence. But when a man uses his imagination professionally as long as I have done it takes a place in his life apart. It has no influence whatever on his daily life, on his physical or even his mental being. He knows it too well. It would seem as if the imagination itself were cognisant of this fact and was too wise to court defeat."




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