"I have been as near failure as any man can go," he said.

"It is over," she answered. "Now tell me of your story."

He told her its outline. She listened with slowly nodding head,
grasping every point quickly, electrically, sympathetically. His slight
awkwardness in speaking of his own work passed away. He expatiated, was
coherent and convincing. More than once she interrupted him. Her
insight was almost miraculous. She penetrated with perfect ease beneath
his words, analysed his motives with him, showed him a psychological
weakness in the workings of one of his characters. She was liberal with
her praise, called his characters by their christian names as though
they were old friends, suggested other moves across the chessboard of
his plot, until he felt that he and she, and those dear puppets of his
own creations, were denizens together of some fairy and ethereal world,
wandering through the fascinating maze of imaginative life. It was
almost an intoxication, this wonderfully stimulating contact with a mind
so receptive, so brilliant, so sympathetic. He forgot his garret,
Cicely, the drear past, the passionate warnings of Drexley and Rice. As
a weaver of stories he was in his first youth. He had peopled but few
worlds with those wonderfully precious creations--the children of the
brain. They were as dear to him as the offspring of his own flesh and
blood could ever be. Hitherto they had been the mysterious but
delightful companions of his solitude. There was a peculiar pleasure in
finding that another, too, could realise them. They seemed indeed to
pass, as they two sat there and talked of them, into an actual and
material existence, to have taken to themselves bodily shapes, the dear
servants of his will, delightful puppets of his own creation. The
colour mounted into his cheeks, and the fire of hot life flashed through