stir in me, a rush of eager inclination to write went
through me. A sudden sense of power filled me. The brain, empty and
idle a few minutes before, became charged with energy and desire to
expend it. A corresponding current of activity poured along each vein.
The old familiar impetus swayed me.

I welcomed it gladly and went upstairs, got out paper and a pen, and
the remembrance of my own life slipped away from me. All that night I
wrote, and the next day, and the fresh manuscript was fairly started.
For a whole fortnight I wrote almost incessantly. I snatched a little
food in the cafe, hardly knowing what I ate.

The nights passed feverishly without sleep, while the brain revolved,
excitedly, scenes written or to be written. Towards the end of the
fortnight the impulses to work steadily declined. I forced myself to
write at intervals; but, as usual, the forced work was worthless, and I
destroyed it when it was done. No, it was no use. I could merely shrug
my shoulders and smoke and wait.

The hot, blank days of August drifted by, and as I saw the boulevards
empty themselves day by day, and Paris grow hotter and duller each
afternoon, I felt the solitary existence weigh heavier and heavier upon
me. The loss of the dog seemed to have made a larger gap in my
existence than I should have believed; his unused collars still lay
upon my mantelpiece, his plate and saucer still stood in the corner by
the hearth, and sometimes when I was climbing the dark stairs at night
to my empty room I felt as if I would have given years of my life to
have had the dog leap up into my arms in welcome.

One of these nights, when I came into the unlighted room, I saw a
letter lying, a white square, in the dusk, upon the table. I supposed
it was from my father, as Lucia never wrote, and I was too occupied, or
indifferent, or rather both, to keep up other correspondents.

In answer to the first long desperate letter that I had written to my
father after Lucia's visit, in which I told him, without explaining
farther, that an accident had happened to the MS., and begging him to
release me from the arrangement made before I left England, I had
received a derisive note from him, full of ironical sympathy with my
misfortunes, and advising me to settle down to another year's work,
with a good grace and a contented spirit.

My appeals on behalf of Lucia and myself he simply ignored.

I tore the letter into atoms and flung them over the balcony,