modern novel, but of the regnant lights of her own country, Mr. Howells
and Mr. James, she had never heard. She may have seen their names in the
"Literary Bulletin" her bookseller sent her, but had probably gathered
that they were biologists. There was no one to tell her that the actors
and happenings within her horizon were the proper substance for her
creative faculty. California had whispered to her, but she had not
understood. Her intention was to write a story of England in the reigns
of Oliver Cromwell and Charles the Second. The romance of England
appealed to her irresistibly. The mass of virgin ore which lay at her
hand did not provoke a flash of magnetism from her brain.

She wrote very slowly. An hour passed, and she had only covered a page.
Her head ached a little from the intense concentration of mind. Her
fingers were stiff. Finally, she laid her pencil aside and read what she
had written. It was a laboured introduction to the story, an attempt to
give a picture of the times. She was only nineteen and a novice, but she
knew that what she had written was rubbish. It was a trite synopsis of
what she had read, of what everybody knew; and the English, although
correct, was commonplace, the vocabulary cheap. She set her lips, tore
it up, and began again. At the end of another hour she destroyed the
second result.

Then she determined to skip the prologue for the present and begin the
story. For many long moments she sat staring into the brush, her brain
plodding toward an opening scene, an opening sentence. At last she began
to write. She described the hero. He was walking down the great
staircase of a baronial hall,--in which he had lain concealed,--and the
company below were struck dumb with terror and amazement at the
apparition. She got him to the middle of the stair; she described his
costume with fidelity; she wrote of the temper of the people in the
great hall. Then she dropped the pencil. What was to happen thereafter
was a blank.

She read what she had written. It was lifeless. It was not fiction. The
least of Helena's letters was more virile and objective than this.

Again that mysterious indefinable presentiment assailed her. It was the
first time that it had come since that night she had stood on the
balcony and opened her brain to literary desire. Had that presentiment
meant anything since compassed? Her father's cruel treatment? Her
terrible experience in the street of painted women? Her illne