be better than putting it in the stove yourself," she
observed, going back with an air of placidity to her sewing, "because
then you'll know it's bad and if you burn it up now, you won't. You
haven't even heard it."

"I heard it before I wrote it," he argued. "I hear it again when I read
it. That's a silly argument. Of course I know it."

"You said a little while ago that you'd never heard any of your music
until Mrs. Wollaston sang those songs. They sounded better than you
thought they would."

"That's different," he protested. "I knew they were good, damned good.
Only I didn't quite realize how good they were. I suppose I won't realize
until I hear her sing this how rotten it is. But I don't need to. I know
well enough right now."

He went on turning the pages back and forth with gloomy violence, reading
a passage here and another there and failing to get the faintest ray of
comfort out of any of it, even out of the old soiled quires which
belonged obviously to the original score.

"Is it all bad?" she asked. "Or just the new part."

"The whole thing," he grunted.

"That's that Belgian thing, isn't it?"

"That's the one."

"Well," she pointed out to him, "you thought that was good once. If it
all looks alike to you this morning, perhaps what you've just been
writing is as good as that, and it's just your mood to-day that makes it
look rotten."

He closed the score and slapped his hand down upon it with a gesture of
dismissal. Then he rose and leaned back against the edge of the table.
"That's good logic, my dear," he conceded, "but it doesn't cover the
ground. The old stuff was good in a way. I really meant it and felt it
and I managed to get it down on paper. And the new stuff is like it, in
that it's a damned clever imitation of it. I had to do it that way
because I couldn't get back into the old mood. I'm sick of atrocities and
horrors--everything that's got the name of war in it, even though I was
never under fire myself. Well, writing the imitation has made me hate the
thing I was trying to imitate. I stuck at it for the reason I told you
this morning. But, good God, when it results in stuff like this...!
Jennie, what shall I do about it? Shall I take this thing now and chuck
it into the stove and then tell La Chaise and Mrs. Wollaston to go to the
devil? Or shall I tuck it under my arm like a good little boy and see if
I can get away with it?"

She looked at him thoughtfully. "What is the new thin