Mr.
Rickman's study. She said that she went in to tidy it; but strange to
say, the more Flossie tidied it the more hopeless it became. Mr.
Rickman's study was never what you might call a really tidy room; but
at any rate there had always been a certain repose about it. And now
you could not well imagine a more unrestful place, a place more
suggestive of hurry and disorder, of an utter lack of the leisure in
which ideas ripen and grow great.

The table had become a troubled sea of primeval manuscript, where Mr.
Rickman sat with his head in his hands, brooding over the face of the
waters. He had once profanely said that God's world was a chaos he had
got to work on. Now it was _his_ world that was chaos. A tempestuous
chaos, where things to be weltered in the wreck of things that were.
Rickman's genius, like Nature, destroyed in order that it might
create; yet it seemed to him that nowadays the destruction was out of
all proportion to the creation. He sighed as he gazed at the piteous
fragments that represented six months' labour; fragments that wept
blood; the torn and mutilated limbs of living thoughts; with here and
there huge torsos of blank verse, lopped and hewn in the omnipotent
fury of a god at war with his world; mixed up with undeveloped and
ethereal shapes, the embryos of dreams.

And yet it was not altogether the divine rage of the artist that had
wrought this havoc. The confusion argued a power at war with itself
rather than with its creations; the very vastness of it all suggested
a deity tied as to time, but apparently unshackled as to space. That
was it. There really wasn't as much time as there used to be. It was
in his free evenings and on Sundays that his best thoughts came to
him, the beautiful shy thoughts that must be delicately courted. And
now his free evenings and his Sundays were given up to the courting of
Flossie. And even on a week-day this was what would happen. He would
rush home early from Fleet Street and settle down for two hours' work
before dinner. Then a little timid knock would be heard at the door,
and Flossie would come in bringing him a cup of tea. He couldn't just
swill it down like a pig and send the dear little thing away. He _had_
to let her sit and see him drink it, slowly, as if he thoroughly
enjoyed it. Or he would come in (as on that blessed evening six months
ago) and find Flossie dusting books; standing perhaps on two tottering
hassocks and a chair, at an altitude peri