fuse to be surmounted, and all the pain, the labor, the
downright mental travail and anguish that fall to the lot of the writer
of novels.

To write a short story with the end in plain sight from the beginning
was an easy matter compared to the upbuilding, grain by grain, atom by
atom, of the fabric of "In Defiance of Authority." Condy soon found
that there was but one way to go about the business. He must shut his
eyes to the end of his novel--that far-off, divine event--and take his
task chapter by chapter, even paragraph by paragraph; grinding out the
tale, as it were, by main strength, driving his pen from line to line,
hating the effort, happy only with the termination of each chapter, and
working away, hour by hour, minute by minute, with the dogged, sullen,
hammer-and-tongs obstinacy of the galley-slave, scourged to his daily
toil.

At times the tale, apparently out of sheer perversity, would come to a
full stop. To write another word seemed beyond the power of human
ingenuity, and for an hour or more Condy would sit scowling at the
half-written page, gnawing his nails, scouring his hair, dipping his
pen into the ink-well, and squaring himself to the sheet of paper, all
to no purpose.

There was no pleasure in it for him. A character once fixed in his
mind, a scene once pictured in his imagination, and even before he had
written a word the character lost the charm of its novelty, the scene
the freshness of its original conception. Then, with infinite
painstaking and with a patience little short of miraculous, he must
slowly build up, brick by brick, the plan his brain had outlined in a
single instant. It was all work--hard, disagreeable, laborious work;
and no juggling with phrases, no false notions as to the "delight of
creation," could make it appear otherwise. "And for what," he muttered
as he rose, rolled up his sheaf of manuscript, and put on his coat;
"what do I do it for, I don't know."

It was beyond question that, had he begun his novel three months before
this time, Condy would have long since abandoned the hateful task. But
Blix had changed all that. A sudden male force had begun to develop in
Condy. A master-emotion had shaken him, and he had commenced to see
and to feel the serious, more abiding, and perhaps the sterner side of
life. Blix had steadied him, there was no denying that. He was not
quite the same boyish, hairbrained fellow who had made "a buffoon of
himself" in the Chinese