Still, it is possible that this little
girl, whoever she was, was idealized by the artist, who painted into her
his own dream of exquisite childhood."
Again he turned away impatiently. "I believe I am rather fond of
children," he admitted. "I catch myself watching them on the street when
they are pretty enough. Well, who does not like them?" he added, with
some defiance.
He went back to his work; he was chiselling a story which was to be the
foremost excuse of a magazine as yet unborn. At the end of half an hour
he threw down his wondrous instrument--which looked not unlike an
ordinary pen--and making no attempt to disobey the desire that possessed
him, went back to the gallery. The dark splendid boy, the angelic little
girl were all he saw--even of the several children in that roll-call of
the past--and they seemed to look straight down his eyes into depths
where the fragmentary ghosts of unrecorded ancestors gave faint musical
response.
"The dead's kindly recognition of the dead," he thought. "But I wish
these children were alive."
For a week he haunted the gallery, and the children haunted him. Then he
became impatient and angry. "I am mooning like a barren woman," he
exclaimed.
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