one you talked with her about. The idea of a decent perfection."

"She'd help it--she'd help it!" the young man cried.

"For about a year--the first year, yes. After that she'd be as a
millstone round its neck."

Paul frankly wondered. "Why she has a passion for the real thing, for
good work--for everything you and I care for most."

"'You and I' is charming, my dear fellow!" his friend laughed. "She has
it indeed, but she'd have a still greater passion for her children--and
very proper too. She'd insist on everything's being made comfortable,
advantageous, propitious for them. That isn't the artist's business."

"The artist--the artist! Isn't he a man all the same?"

St. George had a grand grimace. "I mostly think not. You know as well
as I what he has to do: the concentration, the finish, the independence
he must strive for from the moment he begins to wish his work really
decent. Ah my young friend, his relation to women, and especially to the
one he's most intimately concerned with, is at the mercy of the damning
fact that whereas he can in the nature of things have but one standard,
they have about fifty. That's what makes them so superior," St. George
amusingly added. "Fancy an artist with a change of standards as you'd
have a change of shirts or of dinner-plates. To _do_ it--to do it and
make it divine--is the only thing he has to think about. 'Is it done or
not?' is his only question. Not 'Is it done as well as a proper
solicitude for my dear little family will allow?' He has nothing to do
with the relative--he has only to do with the absolute; and a dear little