Chapter III

I suppose nobody but the creative artist knows the agony that follows a great success. For once Sidney had touched the stars, and his hands were impatient to reach them again. In the months that followed he was like a caged demon, creating and destroying, brooding. He even drank absinthe, a thing he had always been afraid of, and finally in a fit of what was probably more anguish than anger, he threw Julie out of the house for good. She seemed, I imagine, to shorten his grasp. I know he formulated a theory at that time as to the connection between celibacy and inspiration, and he and Father Alexis, the curé, mustered between them an imposing list to prove their case.

But it did not come back, the thing that had created Cynara. Indeed, it was twelve years in coming, and that twelve years forgot Julie, wrecked Anne and did more things to me than I care to remember.

For he married Anne.

Possibly it was his method of attaining the ideal he had somehow lost. Anne, you see, _was_ the Cynara to him. He must have felt that she would bring him again whatever it was that had come and gone. And of course she did not. He did not love her, for one thing. He had no lover’s illusion with which to cover her, once she had ceased to represent the lost woman of a man’s dreams.

“If only I hadn’t married him,” she said to me once, “I would have helped him more. I stood for something then, Maurice. Now—!”

The truth is, of course, that he was not capable of love. Not then, anyhow. His mind was entirely turned in on himself, not so much selfishly, as with the conviction that somewhere there, inside him, lay the thing he was waiting for.

The man who marries a woman only because of her aloofness and her essential virginity has little enough to go on, once the one is bridged and the other destroyed. And he had had little enough at the best. What Anne suffered was shown by what she did later.