frightened of her again. Only because she was serious and friendly
did he trouble himself to reply. "There is one little fact I should
like to tell you, as confuting your theory. The idea of a story--a long
story--had been in my head for a year. As a dream to amuse myself--the
kind of amusement you would recommend for the future. I should have had
time to write it, but the people round me coloured my life, and so it
never seemed worth while. For the story is not likely to pay. Then came
the volcano. A few days after it was over I lay in bed looking out upon
a world of rubbish. Two men I know--one intellectual, the other very
much the reverse--burst into the room. They said, 'What happened to
your short stories? They weren't good, but where are they? Why have you
stopped writing? Why haven't you been to Italy? You must write. You
must go. Because to write, to go, is you.' Well, I have written, and
yesterday we sent the long story out on its rounds. The men do not like
it, for different reasons. But it mattered very much to them that I
should write it, and so it got written. As I told you, this is only one
fact; other facts, I trust, have happened in the last five months. But
I mention it to prove that people are important, and therefore, however
much it inconveniences my wife, I will not go back to her."

"And Italy?" asked Mrs. Failing.

This question he avoided. Italy must wait. Now that he had the time, he
had not the money.

"Or what is the long story about, then?"

"About a man and a woman who meet and are happy."

"Somewhat of a tour de force, I conclude."

He frowned. "In literature we needn't intrude our own limitations.
I'm not so silly as to think that all marriages turn out like mine. My
character is to blame for our catastrophe, not marriage."

"My dear, I too have married; marriage is to blame."

But here again he seemed to know better.

"Well," she said, leaving the table and moving with her dessert to the
mantelpiece, "so you are abandoning marriage and taking to literature.
And are happy."

"Yes."

"Because, as we used to say at Cambridge, the cow is there. The world is
real again. This is a room, that a window, outside is the night."

"Go on."

He pointed to the floor. "The day is straight below, shining through
other windows into other rooms."

"You are very odd," she said after a pause, "and I do not like you at
all. There you sit, eating my biscuits, and all the time you know that
th