e room with a duster in her hand,
with which she stopped to polish the backs of already lustrous books,
musing and romancing as she did so. Suddenly the right phrase or the
penetrating point of view would suggest itself, and she would drop her
duster and write ecstatically for a few breathless moments; and then the
mood would pass away, and the duster would be sought for, and the old
books polished again. These spells of inspiration never burnt steadily,
but flickered over the gigantic mass of the subject as capriciously as
a will-o'-the-wisp, lighting now on this point, now on that. It was as
much as Katharine could do to keep the pages of her mother's manuscript
in order, but to sort them so that the sixteenth year of Richard
Alardyce's life succeeded the fifteenth was beyond her skill. And
yet they were so brilliant, these paragraphs, so nobly phrased, so
lightning-like in their illumination, that the dead seemed to crowd the
very room. Read continuously, they produced a sort of vertigo, and set
her asking herself in despair what on earth she was to do with them? Her
mother refused, also, to face the radical questions of what to leave in
and what to leave out. She could not decide how far the public was to
be told the truth about the poet's separation from his wife. She drafted
passages to suit either case, and then liked each so well that she could
not decide upon the rejection of either.

But the book must be written. It was a duty that they owed the world,
and to Katharine, at least, it meant more than that, for if they could
not between them get this one book accomplished they had no right to
their privileged position. Their increment became yearly more and
more unearned. Besides, it must be established indisputably that her
grandfather was a very great man.

By the time she was twenty-seven, these thoughts had become very
familiar to her. They trod their way through her mind as she sat
opposite her mother of a morning at a table heaped with bundles of
old letters and well supplied with pencils, scissors, bottles of gum,
india-rubber bands, large envelopes, and other appliances for the
manufacture of books. Shortly before Ralph Denham's visit, Katharine had
resolved to try the effect of strict rules upon her mother's habits
of literary composition. They were to be seated at their tables every
morning at ten o'clock, with a clean-swept morning of empty, secluded
hours before them. They were to keep their eyes fas