CHAPTER XVI.
THEOPHIL ALL THIS TIME Have I seemed to shirk the subject of Theophil's feelings all this time?
Well, I confess I have rather shrunk from writing down in so many words that he was in love with Isabel,--obvious as the fact has been,--just as he himself shrank from admitting the same truth even to his own soul.
When he had sat up in his study that night of the recital, he had looked the whole sad splendid truth in its wonderful face, had loved it wildly for an hour, and then shut his eyes to it for ever.
He knew that Isabel was the woman God had made for him, sweet, dear Jenny the woman he had made for himself, and he bowed before the work of the greater artist.
Never voice nor look nor touch of woman had affected Theophil before as the least tone or glance or movement of Isabel stirred him to the centre of his being.

To meet her eyes was to release a music that went shuddering through the whole world; her lightest word was filled with echoes of infinite things.

Not a lover only, but anyone with instincts for such perceptions, looking at Isabel, would have said: There is a woman who is needed to make some man a great poet, a great artist, some kind of great man! She belongs to the history-making women.

Hundreds of women will attract men by the hundred where she will attract comparatively few, but that few will be the pick of men; and some day, when the other women have gone the way of all sweet roses, she will still remain (if she has found an artist to understand her face) the frontispiece of some distinguished biography, or hang in a gallery of the period among the few faces that were indestructibly personal; not the faces that have lived, but the faces that still go on living, the faces that are influences still, the unique, daemonic faces.
Isabel was indeed a muse that waited for her poet.

The mere idea of such a woman, cherished across dividing seas and separating years, will help a man be great.