other, was beyond his technical resource. An essay or a poem accommodated you by going in whatever direction you chose; but a novel had its own ideas of direction, and refused to let you know what they were; to find out you had to listen for hours, with your ear on your heart.
Even the parts that sounded professional were signally lacking in spontaneity, whereas any masterpiece must, to his notion of it, have the ring of an impromptu fait à loisir. His poor dear story was all leisure, and very little impromptu. The best he could honestly claim for it was that it was a safety valve. What he hoped for it he scarcely dared to admit.
"I'm becoming so literary," he added, in his letter to Geoffrey, "that I require a pencil at the table, along with my knife and fork." But he did not add, as he might have done, that the wayward pencil was as like as not to use up its energy for the morning in a caricature of the bearded man at the next table.
If this were only Aldergrove! he caught himself sighing one Sunday afternoon as he lolled on a bank beside the historic Marne. In his pocket was an unexpected letter from Rhoda Marple, breaking a long silence. Rhoda had grown weary of her social rounds, and had gone into her father's office,—it was almost as though she had independently come to a conclusion analogous to his own.
"A few years ago," her letter had run, "every girl used to talk about a career. Nowadays they talk about
