ened suddenly, "I have so little time." His
briskness dropped into a half complaint, like a faintly suggested avowal
of impotence. "I have been at it four years now. It struck me--you
seemed to coincide so singularly with my ideas."

His speech came wavering to a close, but he recommenced it
apologetically--as if he wished me to help him out.

"I went to see Smithson the publisher about it, and he said he had no
objection...."

He looked appealingly at me. I kept silence.

"Of course, it's not your sort of work. But you might try.... You
see...." He came to a sustained halt.

"I don't understand," I said, rather coldly, when the silence became
embarrassing. "You want me to 'ghost' for you?"

"'Ghost,' good gracious no," he said, energetically; "dear me, no!"

"Then I really don't understand," I said.

"I thought you might see your ... I wanted you to collaborate with me.
Quite publicly, of course, as far as the epithet applies."

"To collaborate," I said slowly. "You...."

I was looking at a miniature of the Farnese Hercules--I wondered what it
meant, what club had struck the wheel of my fortune and whirled it into
this astounding attitude.

"Of course you must think about it," he said.

"I don't know," I muttered; "the idea is so new. It's so little in my
line. I don't know what I should make of it."

I talked at random. There were so many thoughts jostling in my head. It
seemed to carry me so much farther from the kind of work I wanted to do.
I did not really doubt my ability--one does not. I rather regarded it as
work upon a lower plane. And it was a tremendous--an incredibly
tremendous--opportunity.

"You know pretty well how much I've done," he continued. "I've got a
good deal of material together and a good deal of the actual writing is
done. But there is ever so much still to do. It's getting beyond me, as
I said just now."

I looked at him again, rather incredulously. He stood before me, a thin
parallelogram of black with a mosaic of white about the throat. The
slight grotesqueness of the man made him almost impossibly real in his
abstracted earnestness. He so much meant what he said that he ignored
what his hands were doing, or his body or his head. He had taken a very
small, very dusty book out of a little shelf beside him, and was
absently turning over the rusty leaves, while he talked with his head
bent over it. What was I to him, or he to me?

"I could give my Saturday afternoons to it,"