In riding the wave of small success
I got the habit of small success. When I could not catch the line I wanted
to make a drawing live, I dropped my pencil and, taking a girl upon my
arm, went for a day in the country. Once, sitting in a restaurant, I
overheard two women talking of the beauty of my eyes and was made happy
for a week."
Telfer threw up his hands in disgust.
"My flow of words, my ready trick of talking; to what does it bring me?
Let me tell you. It has brought me to this--that at fifty I, who might
have been an artist fixing the minds of thousands upon some thing of
beauty or of truth, have become a village cut-up, a pot-house wit, a
flinger of idle words into the air of a village intent upon raising corn.
"If you ask me why, I tell you that my mind was paralysed by small success
and if you ask me where I got the taste for that, I tell you that I got it
when I saw it lurking in a woman's eyes and heard the pleasant little
songs that lull to sleep upon a woman's lips."
The boy, sitting upon the grassy bank beside Telfer, began thinking of
life in Caxton. The man smoking the cigarette fell into one of his rare
silences. The boy thought of girls that had come into his mind at night,
of how he had been thrilled by a glance from the eyes of a little blue-
eyed school girl who had once visited at Freedom Smith's home and of how
he had gone at night to stand under her window.
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