he might stare at
them as much as he liked. It was seeing life.

Agnes put her lover safely into an omnibus at Cambridge Circus. She
shouted after him that his tie was rising over his collar, but he
did not hear her. For a moment she felt depressed, and pictured quite
accurately the effect that his appearance would have on the editor. The
editor was a tall neat man of forty, slow of speech, slow of soul, and
extraordinarily kind. He and Rickie sat over a fire, with an enormous
table behind them whereon stood many books waiting to be reviewed.

"I'm sorry," he said, and paused.

Rickie smiled feebly.

"Your story does not convince." He tapped it. "I have read it with very
great pleasure. It convinces in parts, but it does not convince as a
whole; and stories, don't you think, ought to convince as a whole?"

"They ought indeed," said Rickie, and plunged into self-depreciation.
But the editor checked him.

"No--no. Please don't talk like that. I can't bear to hear any one talk
against imagination. There are countless openings for imagination,--for
the mysterious, for the supernatural, for all the things you are trying
to do, and which, I hope, you will succeed in doing. I'm not OBJECTING
to imagination; on the contrary, I'd advise you to cultivate it, to
accent it. Write a really good ghost story and we'd take it at once.
Or"--he suggested it as an alternative to imagination--"or you might get
inside life. It's worth doing."

"Life?" echoed Rickie anxiously.

He looked round the pleasant room, as if life might be fluttering there
like an imprisoned bird. Then he looked at the editor: perhaps he was
sitting inside life at this very moment. "See life, Mr. Elliot, and then
send us another story." He held out his hand. "I am sorry I have to say
'No, thank you'; it's so much nicer to say, 'Yes, please.'" He laid his
hand on the young man's sleeve, and added, "Well, the interview's not
been so alarming after all, has it?"

"I don't think that either of us is a very alarming person," was not
Rickie's reply. It was what he thought out afterwards in the omnibus.
His reply was "Ow," delivered with a slight giggle.

As he rumbled westward, his face was drawn, and his eyes moved quickly
to the right and left, as if he would discover something in the squalid
fashionable streets some bird on the wing, some radiant archway, the
face of some god beneath a beaver hat. He loved, he was loved, he had
seen death and other things;