re that she left behind her was enough for him and
that he could not, in justice, expect any more. Before Maggie's arrival
he had had but a slender excuse for his continual presence. He could
not sit in the empty drawing-room surveying the large and ominous
portrait of the Cardinal childhood, quite alone save for Thomas,
without seeming a very considerable kind of fool. And to appear that in
the eyes of Aunt Anne, who already regarded mankind in general with
pity, would be a mistake.

Now that Maggie was here he might come so often as he pleased. Many was
the dark afternoon through the long February and March months that they
sat together in the dim drawing-room, Maggie straining her eyes over an
attempted reform of some garment, Mr. Magnus talking in his mild
ironical voice with his large moon-like spectacles fixed upon nothing
in particular.

Mr. Magnus did all the talking. Maggie fancied that, all his life, he
had persisted in the same gentle humorous fashion without any especial
attention as to the wisdom, agreement or even existence of his
audience. She fancied that all men who wrote books did that. They had
to talk to "clear their ideas." She raised her eyes sometimes and
looked at him as he sat there. His shabby, hapless appearance always
appealed to her. She knew that he was, in reality, anything but
hapless, but his clothes never fitted him, and it was impossible for
him to escape from the Quixotic embarrassments of his thin hair, his
high cheek-bones, his large spectacles. His smile, however, gave him
his character; when he smiled--and he was always smiling--you saw a man
independent, proud, wise and gentle. He was not a fool, Mr. Magnus,
although he did love Aunt Anne.

To a great deal that he said Maggie paid but little attention; it was,
she felt, not intended for her. She had, in all her relations with him,
to struggle against the initial disadvantage that she regarded all men
who wrote books with pity. She was not so stupid as not to realise that
there were a great many fine books in the world and that one was the
better for reading them, but, just because there were, already, so many
fine ones, why write more that would almost certainly be not so fine?
He tried to explain, to her that some men were compelled to write and
could not help themselves.

"I wrote my first book when I was nineteen. One morning I just began to
write, and then it was very easy. Then everything else was easy. The
first publis