"Ah they make it so well to-day--it's wonderfully deceptive!"

Our friend thrilled with the interest and perhaps even more with the pity
of it. Yet he wasn't afraid to seem to patronise when he could still so
far envy. "Is it deceptive that I find you living with every appearance
of domestic felicity--blest with a devoted, accomplished wife, with
children whose acquaintance I haven't yet had the pleasure of making, but
who _must_ be delightful young people, from what I know of their
parents?"

St. George smiled as for the candour of his question. "It's all
excellent, my dear fellow--heaven forbid I should deny it. I've made a
great deal of money; my wife has known how to take care of it, to use it
without wasting it, to put a good bit of it by, to make it fructify. I've
got a loaf on the shelf; I've got everything in fact but the great
thing."

"The great thing?" Paul kept echoing.

"The sense of having done the best--the sense which is the real life of
the artist and the absence of which is his death, of having drawn from
his intellectual instrument the finest music that nature had hidden in
it, of having played it as it should be played. He either does that or
he doesn't--and if he doesn't he isn't worth speaking of. Therefore,
precisely, those who really know _don't_ speak of him. He may still hear
a great chatter, but what he hears most is the incorruptible silence of
Fame. I've squared her, you may say, for my little hour--but what's my
little hour? Don't imagine for a moment," the Master pursued, "that I'm
such a cad as to have brought you down here to abuse or to complain of my
wife to you. She's a woman of distinguished qualities, to whom my