but it was nibbling incessantly at his consciousness, waking him up in the middle of the night, sending him off into reveries in the midst of his diplomatic labors, and, as soon as a week-end came around, driving him away to Rouen or Versailles or any one of a dozen refuges that his increased income had made possible. He would set out with a handbag and many sheets of white paper,—the old portfolio having again come into its own (it won't be denied a future, thought Grover),—but the moment he was installed in his hotel the story flew back to town, leaving him alone to divert himself as best he might.
It was to be an ironic story, yet it kept turning solemn, which made for the utmost confusion. Moreover, just as in the old days he had got words when he was trying to create pictures and his colors all ran into a muddy puddle, so now he got pictures whenever his mind groped for a recalcitrant phrase. His tragic episodes, when he reread his script, bordered perillously on the comic, and his attempts at humor were dire. Talent, he concluded in discouragemem, isn't even half the battle; unless you define talent as the ability to cultivate talent. The injustice of it all was the fact that he hadn't even wanted to write the foolish story; the story was rather trying to write him! It had foisted itself on him, and he felt that that being the case, and he doing his very best to oblige it, it might at least pose for him without wriggling. To keep it smoothly running, to fit one part noiselessly into the
