confession to the birds, if they had happened to produce the same
irritation in his mind.

"They all say your work is so brilliant," she said, soothingly.

"Thunder!" he commented. "I wish they would not say anything kind and
pleasant and cheap. At college they praised my verses, and the theatres
stole my music for the Pudding play, and the girls giggled over my
sketches. And now, at twenty-six, I don't know whether I want to fiddle,
or to write an epic, or to model, or to paint. I am a victim of every
artistic impulse."

"I know what you should do," she said, wisely, when they had reached a
shady spot and were cooling themselves.

"Smoke?" queried Clayton, quizzically.

"You ought to marry!"

"That's every woman's great solution, great panacea," he replied,
contemptuously.

"It would steady you and make you work."

"No," he replied, thoughtfully, "not unless she were poor, and in that
case it would be from the frying-pan into the fire!"

"You should work," she went on, more courageously. "And a wife would give
you inspiration and sympathy."