o fresh achievements. Oh, to have had
something definite to turn to in those days, something that called for
instant completion! To have had some inexorable daily task, some duty
for which he was paid, in a government office, or in some private
undertaking of his own, for which he would have been obliged, like so
many other men, to leave his house at a fixed hour, and to be absorbed
in other preoccupations till his return. What a physical, material
relief he would have found in such a claim! Round most men of his age
life has woven many interests, many ties, many calls, on their time and
energies from outside as well as from those near to them, but all those
spare, available energies of his had been absorbed and appropriated,
filled up, nearer home, and so completely that he had never needed
anything else. And now, whither should he turn? What should he do? Then
he remembered his Book, the Book his wife and he had been accustomed to
talk of with such confidence, such certainty--he now realised how
very little there was of it done, or how much of what might be fruitful
in the conception was owing to the way that she, in their talking over
it, had held it up to him, so that now one light played round it, now
another. Well he remembered how, only two days before she was taken ill,
they had talked of it for a long time until she, with an enthusiasm that
made it seem already a completed masterpiece, had said with a smile,
"Now then, all that remains is to write it!" And he had almost believed,
as he left her, that it would spring into life some day, that it would
not only hold the place in his life of the Great Possibility that is
necessary to us all, but that he would actually put his fate to the
proof by carrying it into execution. He took out the portfolio in which
were the notes he had made about it now and again. They bore the seared
outward aspect of an entirely different mental condition from that with
which they came in contact now. What is that subtle, mocking change that
comes over even the inanimate things that we have not seen since we
were happy, and now meet again in grief? It is like a horrible inversion
of the golden touch given to Midas. To Gore, during those days, the
darkness fell upon every fresh thing to which he went back. The
impression was so strong on him as he turned over the manuscript, that
he shuddered. What was the use of all this? What was it worth? He knew
in his heart that the person of all oth