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undreds of pages, and say it in a couple of paragraphs. Every word must illuminate the past, in every sentence may be found the sequel." "Cintras, I vow your case is hopeless. You are a regular cherry-stone carver. Here you've shown us the skeletons of two stories and yet given none of them flesh enough to live upon." "Berkeley you belong to a past full of novelistic monsters. You are the three volume man with the happy ending tacked on willy-nilly. It is the tact of omission--" "Hang your art-for-art theories. I'll make more money than Cintras ever did when I publish my "Art of Anonymous Letter Writing!" cut in Hodson. Cintras calmly continued, "Here is my title and see if you can follow me." INELUCTABLE The light waned as with tense fingers he turned the round, bevelled-edge screw of the lamp. Darkness, immitigable, profound, and soft, must soon succeed yellow radiance. To face this gloom, to live in it and breathe of it, set his heart harshly beating. Yet he slowly turned with tense fingers the bevelled-edge screw of the lamp. He would presently be forced to a criticism of the day, that day, which must brilliantly flame when night closed upon him. As in the vivid agony endured between two bell-strokes of a clock, he strove to answer the oppressing shape threatening him. And his fingers lingeringly revolved the lamp-screw with its brass and bevelled-edge. If only some gust of resolution would arise like the sudden scud of the squall that whitens far-away level summer seas, and drive forth pampered procrastinations! Then might his fingers become flexile, his mind untied. Poor, drab seconds that fooled with eternity and supped on vain courage as they went trooping by. Could not one keen point of consciousness abide? Why must all go humming into oblivion like untuned values? He grasped at a single strand of recollection; he saw her parted lips, the passionate reproach of her eyes and felt her strenuous tacit acquiescence; he sensed the richness of her love. So he stood, unstable, vacillating and a treacherous groper amidst cruel shards of an ineluctable memory, powerless to stay the fair phantom and fearful of looking night squarely in the front. And he remained a dweller in the shadows, as he faintly fingered the bevelled-edge screw of the l
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