-some different way--of letting her know it; but he could
not conceive that tenderness and desire could ever again be one for him:
such a notion as that seemed part of the monstrous sentimental muddle on
which his life had gone aground.

"I shall write--of course I shall write some day," he said, turning back
to his seat. "I've had a novel in the back of my head for years; and
now's the time to pull it out."

He hardly knew what he was saying; but before the end of the sentence he
saw that Clare had understood what he meant to convey, and henceforth he
felt committed to letting her talk to him as much as she pleased about
his book. He himself, in consequence, took to thinking about it more
consecutively; and just as his friends ceased to urge him to write, he
sat down in earnest to begin.

The vision that had come to him had no likeness to any of his earlier
imaginings. Two or three subjects had haunted him, pleading for
expression, during the first years of his marriage; but these now seemed
either too lyrical or too tragic. He no longer saw life on the heroic
scale: he wanted to do something in which men should look no bigger than
the insects they were. He contrived in the course of time to reduce one
of his old subjects to these dimensions, and after nights of brooding he
made a dash at it, and wrote an opening chapter that struck him as
not too bad. In the exhilaration of this first attempt he spent some
pleasant evenings revising and polishing his work; and gradually a
feeling of authority and importance developed in him. In the morning,
when he woke, instead of his habitual sense of lassitude, he felt an
eagerness to be up and doing, and a conviction that his individual task
was a necessary part of the world's machinery. He kept his secret with
the beginner's deadly fear of losing his hold on his half-real creations
if he let in any outer light on them; but he went about with a more
assured step, shrank less from meeting his friends, and even began to
dine out again, and to laugh at some of the jokes he heard.

Laura Fairford, to get Paul away from town, had gone early to the
country; and Ralph, who went down to her every Saturday, usually found
Clare Van Degen there. Since his divorce he had never entered his
cousin's pinnacled palace; and Clare had never asked him why he stayed
away. This mutual silence had been their sole allusion to Van Degen's
share in the catastrophe, though Ralph had spoken frankly of it