be a man and had become a ferret. It was no
light payment exacted in return for the pleasure of writing about Elaine.
He had the ability to live in any place or century he pleased, but he had
paid for it by putting his present reality upon precisely the same
footing. Detachment was his continually. Henceforth he was a spectator
merely, without any particular concern in what passed before his eyes.
Some people he should know at a glance, others in a week, a month, or a
year. Across the emptiness between them, some one should clasp his hand,
yet share no more his inner life than one who lies beside a dreamer and
thinks thus to know where the other wanders on the strange trails of
sleep.

In the dregs of the Cup lay the potential power to cast off his present
life as a mollusk leaves his shell, and as completely forget it. For Love,
and Death, and Pain are only symbols to him who is enslaved by the pen.
Moreover, he suffers always the pangs of an unsatisfied hunger, the
exquisite torture of an unappeased and unappeasable thirst, for something
which, like a will-o'-the-wisp, hovers ever above and beyond him, past the
power of words to interpret or express.

It is often reproachfully said that one "makes copy" of himself and his
friends--that nothing is too intimately sacred to be seized upon and
dissected in print. Not so long ago, it was said that a certain man was
"botanising on his mother's grave," a pardonable confusion, perhaps, of
facts and realities. The bitter truth is that the writer lives his
books--and not much else. From title to colophon, he escapes no pang,
misses no joy. The life of the book is his from beginning to end. At the
close of it, he has lived what his dream people have lived and borne the
sorrows of half a dozen entire lifetimes, mercilessly concentrated into
the few short months of writing.

One by one, his former pleasures vanish. Even the divine consolation of
books is partly if not wholly gone. Behind the printed page, he sees ever
the machinery of composition, the preparation for climax, the repetition
in its proper place, the introduction and interweaving of major and minor,
of theme and contrast. For the fine, glowing fancy of the other man has
not appeared in his book, and to the eye of the fellow-craftsman only the
mechanism is there. Mask-like, the author stands behind his Punch-and-Judy
box, twitching the strings that move his marionettes, heedless of the fact
that in his audience ther