and living hands, as she had done the night before, “… you are a great man… a great writer…. I am so proud and happy to have known you… to be allowed to hear your play.”
He felt the overpowering, thrilling happiness and joy, the blind speechless gratefulness, and the helpless and agonizing embarrassment that a young man feels at a moment like this. He did not know what to say, what to do, how to express the gratefulness, the affection, the tenderness that he felt towards them; he turned to Joel, his mouth moving wordlessly and helplessly, and could say nothing, he made a baffled and inarticulate movement of the hands, and ended up by putting his arms around Rosalind and hugging her in a clumsy, helpless fashion, which was perhaps as good a thing as he could do, and said all he wished to say.
It was not what these two young people had said to him that gave the moment a strange imperishable loveliness. Even in the blind surge of joy and happiness that swept over him and made him passionately want to believe that his play was as good as Joel and his sister said it was, that he was really the great man, the great writer they had called him, a grain of judgment remained and saved him from an utter self-deception. And curiously, for that very reason, his joy was somehow greater, his feeling of triumphant happiness sweeter than if what they had said were true. For in the very idolatry of their devotion, the enthusiastic exaggeration of their praise, there was all the blind but noble loyalty of youth, the beautiful and generous admiration of youth, that is so fine, so good, so high, so proud with faith and confidence and loyalty, and because of this, so right. It was for this reason that, even after years had passed and he had perhaps accomplished better work, earned more valid praise, he would yet remember that morning with a peculiar sense of proud and tender gratefulness. It brought back to him, as nothing else on earth could do, the beauty and the innocence of youth, the extravagance of its blind devotion that is so mistaken and so wonderful, the generous enthusiasm of its loyal faith that is so wrong and yet so right, its noble sincerity that burns brightly even in its grievous error, and that is somehow more true than fact, more real than glory, and more lasting and more precious than man’s fame.
LXIII
When they came out on the verandah, Joel’s mother, Howard Martin, and Joel’s cousin, Ruth, had just driven up before the entrance and were getting
