ke up for it by working at my novel.

It refused to materialize.

I felt, like the man in the fable, as if some one had played a mean
trick on me, and substituted for my brain a side order of
cauliflower. By no manner of means could I get the plot to shape
itself. I could not detach my mind from my own painful case. Instead
of thinking of my characters, I sat in my chair and thought miserably
of Phyllis.

The only progress I achieved was with my villain.

I drew him from the professor and made him a blackmailer. He had
several other social defects, but that was his profession. That was
the thing he did really well.

It was on one of the many occasions on which I had sat in my room, pen
in hand, through the whole of a lovely afternoon, with no better
result than a slight headache, that I bethought me of that little
paradise on the Ware Cliff, hung over the sea and backed by green
woods. I had not been there for sometime, owing principally to an
entirely erroneous idea that I could do more solid work sitting in a
straight, hard chair at a table than lying on soft turf with the sea
wind in my eyes.

But now the desire to visit that little clearing again drove me from
my room. In the drawing-room below, the gramophone was dealing
brassily with "Mister Blackman." Outside, the sun was just thinking of
setting. The Ware Cliff was the best medicine for me. What does
Kipling say?

And soon you will find that the sun and the wind
And the Djinn of the Garden, too,
Have lightened the Hump, Cameelious Hump,
The Hump that is black and blue.

His instructions include digging with a hoe and a shovel also, but I
could omit that. The sun and wind were what I needed.

I took the upper road. In certain moods I preferred it to the path
along the cliff. I walked fast. The exercise was soothing.

To reach my favorite clearing I had to take to the fields on the left
and strike down hill in the direction of the sea. I hurried down the
narrow path.

I broke into the clearing at a jog trot, and stood panting. And at the
same moment, looking cool and beautiful in her white dress, Phyllis
entered it from the other side. Phyllis--without the professor.

OF A SENTIMENTAL NATURE

XVII

She was wearing a Panama, and she carried a sketching block and camp
stool.

"Good evening," I said.

"Good evening," said she.

It is curious how different the same words can sound when spoken by
different people. M