"I was--just around," vaguely.

"Not around here," Desire was uncompromising. "Benis, I think we should really be more businesslike. We should have talked this thirteenth chapter over yesterday. I see you have a note here for some opening paragraphs on The Apprehension of Color in Primitive Minds--"

A cascade of goblin laughter from Yorick interrupted her.

"Yorick is amused," said Benis. "He knows all about the apprehension of color in primitive minds. He advises us to go fishing."

Desire watched him stroke the bird's bent head with a puzzled frown.

"I wish you wouldn't joke about--this," she said slowly. "You don't want that habit of mind to affect your serious work."

Spence looked up surprised.

"The whole character of the book is changing," went on Desire resolutely. "It will all have to be revised and brought into harmony.

I'm sure you've felt it yourself. In a book like this the treatment must be the same throughout. I've heard you say that a hundred times.

It doesn't matter what the treatment is, the necessary thing is that it be consistent. Isn't that right?"

"Certainly."

"Well--yours isn't!"

Spence forgot the parrot (who immediately pecked his finger). He almost forgot that he had suffered an awakening and had pa.s.sed a bad night.

Desire interested him in the present moment as she always did. She was--what was she? "Satisfying" was perhaps the best word for it. Just to be with her seemed to round out life.

"Prove it!" said he with some heat.

For half an hour he listened while she proved it with great energy and a thorough knowledge of her facts. He listened because he liked to listen and not because she was telling him anything new. He knew just where his "treatment" of his material had changed, and he knew, as Desire did not, what had changed it. For the change was not really in the treatment at all, but in himself.

This book had been his earliest ambition. It had been the sole companion of his thoughts for years. It had been the little idol which must be served. Without a word of it being written, it had grown with his growth. His notes for it comprised all that he had filched from life. He had not hurried. He was leisurely by nature. Then had come the war, lifting him out of all the things he knew. And, after the war, its great weariness. Not until he had met Desire and found, in her fresh interest, something of his own lost enthusiasm, had he been able to work again. Then, in a glow of recovered energy, the book had been begun. And all had gone well until the book's inspirer had begun to usurp the place of the book itself. (Spence smiled as he realized that Desire was painstakingly tracing the course of her self-caused destruction.) How could he think of the book when he wanted only to think of her? Insensibly, his gathered facts had begun to lose their prime importance, his deductions had lost their sense of weight, all that he had done seemed strangely insignificant--it was like looking at something through the wrong end of a telescope. The great book was a star which grew steadily smaller.

The proportion was wrong. He knew that. But at present he could do nothing to readjust it. Two interests cannot occupy the same s.p.a.ce at the same time. The book interest had simply succ.u.mbed to an interest older and more potent.

"In this chapter, the Sixth," Desire was saying, "you seem to lose some of the serious purpose which is a prominent note in the opening chapters. You begin to treat things casually. You almost allow yourself to be humorous. Now is this supposed to be a humorous book, or is it not?"

"Oh--not. Distinctly not."

"Well then, don't you see? If you had treated the thing in that semi-humorous manner all through and continued in that vein you would produce a certain definite type of book. The critics would probably say--"

"I know, spare me!"

"They would say," sternly, "that 'Professor Spence has a light touch.'

That 'he has treated his subject in a popular manner.'" (The professor groaned.) "But that isn't a patch upon what they will say if you mix up your styles as you are doing at present."

"But--well, what do you advise?"

Desire sucked her pencil. (He had given up trying to cure her of this poisonous habit.)

"I've thought about that. If you were not so--so temperamental, I would say go back and begin again. But that is risky. It will be better to go on, I think, trying to recapture the more serious style, until the whole book it at least in some form. Then you will know exactly where you are and what is necessary to harmonize the whole. You can then rewrite the 'off' chapters, bringing them into line. This is a recognized literary method, I believe."

"Is it? Good heavens!"

"I read it in a book."

"Then it must be literary. All right. I'm agreeable. But at present--"

"At present," firmly, "the main thing is to go on."

"This morning?"

"Certainly."

"But I don't want to go on this morning. That is the flaw in your literary method. It makes me go on whether I want to or not. Now the really top-notchers never do that. They are as full of stoppages as a freight train. Fact. They only create when the spirit moves them."

"Aren't you thinking of Quakers?" suggested Desire sweetly. "Besides you are not creating. You are compiling--a very different thing."

"But what is the use of compiling an off chapter when I know it is going to be an off one?"

Desire threw down her pencil.

"Oh, Benis," she said. "I don't like this. Don't let us play with words. Surely you are not getting tired--you can't be."

Her eyes, urgent and truth-compelling, forced an answer.

"I don't quite know," he said. "But I am certainly off work at present.

There may be all kinds of reasons. You will have to be patient, Desire."

"Then," in a low voice, "it isn't only indolence?"

He was moved to candor. "It isn't indolence at all. I have always been a fairly good worker, and will be again. But the driving force has shifted. I have not been doing good work and I know it. The more I know it the worse the work will become.... It doesn't matter, really, child," he added gently, seeing that she had turned away. "The world can wait for the bit of knowledge I can give it."

Desire, whose face was invisible, took a moment to answer this. When she did her voice was carefully with-out expression.

"Then this ends my usefulness. You will not need me any more."

The professor, who had been nursing his knee on the corner of the desk, straightened up so suddenly that he heard his spine click.

"What's this?" he said. (Good heavens--the girl was as full of surprises as a grab-bag!)

"It was for the book you needed me, was it not? That was my share of our partnership."

("Now you've done it!" shouted an exultant voice in the professor's brain. "Oh, you are an a.s.s!")

"Shut up!" said Spence irritably. "I wasn't talking to you," he explained apologetically. "It's just a horrid little devil I converse with sometimes. What I meant was--" He did not seem to know what he meant and looked rather helplessly out of the window. "Oh, I say," he said presently, "you are not going to--to act like that, are you?

Agitation's so frightfully bad for me. Ask old Bones."

"You are not agitated," said Desire coldly. "Please be serious."

"I am. Deuced serious. And agitated too. You ought to think twice before you startle me like that--just when everything was going along so nicely."