o listen to the old wood-whisper or to
the singing of the fauns he bent more earnestly to his work, turning a
deaf ear to the incantations.

In the curious labor of the bureau he found refreshment that was
continually renewed. He experienced again, and with a far more violent
impulse, the enthusiasm that had attended the writing of his book a year
or two before, and so, perhaps, passed from one drug to another. It was,
indeed, with something of rapture that he imagined the great procession
of years all to be devoted to the intimate analysis of words, to the
construction of the sentence, as if it were a piece of jewelry or mosaic.

Sometimes, in the pauses of the work, he would pace up and down his cell,
looking out of the window now and again and gazing for an instant into
the melancholy street. As the year advanced the days grew more and more
misty, and he found himself the inhabitant of a little island wreathed
about with the waves of a white and solemn sea. In the afternoon the fog
would grow denser, shutting out not only sight but sound; the shriek of
the garden gates, the jangling of the tram-bell echoed as if from a far
way. Then there were days of heavy incessant rain; he could see a grey
drifting sky and the drops plashing in the street, and the houses all
dripping and saddened with wet.

He cured himself of one great aversion. He was no longer nauseated at the
sight of a story begun and left unfinished. Formerly, even when an idea
rose in his mind bright and wonderful, he had always approached the paper
with a feeling of sickness and dislike, remembering all the hopeless
beginnings he had made. But now he understood that to begin a romance was
almost a separate and special art, a thing apart from the story, to be
practiced with sedulous care. Whenever an opening scene occurred to him
he noted it roughly in a book, and he devoted many long winter evenings
to the elaboration of these beginnings. Sometimes the first impression
would yield only a paragraph or a sentence, and once or twice but a
splendid and sonorous word, which seemed to Lucian all dim and rich
with unsurmised adventure. But often he was able to write three or four
vivid pages, studying above all things the hint and significance of the
words and actions, striving to work into the lines the atmosphere of
expectation and promise, and the murmur of wonderful events to come.

In this one department of his task the labor seemed almost endless. He
wou