ved, and he rightly interpreted her abrupt dismissal of him as a
final effort to assert herself before the onset of the inevitable. Even
if he at times suspected her of playing a part, she had chosen the right
part to play, and he respected her for it. He himself was leading a
curious double life. He was working hard at his novel, which promised to
surpass everything that he had yet done. He was so much absorbed in
observing, studying, shaping, and touching up, that it never occurred to
him to ask himself if he were indeed creating. The thing had been
growing under his hands through the autumn; in the winter it seemed to
advance by bounds; but in the spring his work came to a sudden
standstill. He did not know what Laura, his heroine, was going to do
next. He had drawn her as the creature of impulse, but dragging the
dead weight of all the conventions at her back--a woman variously
dramatic when stirred by influences from without, but incapable of
decisive action from within. How would such a woman behave under stress
of conflicting circumstances?--if it came, say, to a fight for
possession between the force of traditional inertia and the feeling of
the moment? On the one hand the problem was as old as the hills, on the
other it was new with every man and woman born into the world. What he
called his literary conscience told him that it had to be solved;
another conscience in him shrank from the solution. At this point
Wyndham did what, as a conscientious artist, he had never done before;
he put his work away for a season, and tried not to think about it,
devoting himself to Audrey Craven instead. Even he was not always able
to preserve the critical attitude with regard to her. As he had told
her, criticism comes first, sympathy last of all. And with him--last of
all--it had come. He could not go on from day to day, seeing, hearing,
and understanding more and more, without acquiring a curious sympathy
with the thing he studied. And when the artist tired of her art, the man
felt all the influence of her natural magic. He was prepared for that,
and had no illusions on the subject.

He tested his present feelings by comparing them with those he had had
for Alison Fraser. He had not the least intention of setting up Audrey
Craven anywhere near his idol's ancient place,--he would have shuddered
at the bare idea of it. This, though he expressed it differently, was
what he meant when he resolved once for all that he would never