was
uninhabited as the desert.

He came back to his cell after these purposeless wanderings always with a
sense of relief, with the thought of taking refuge from grey. As he lit
the gas and opened the desk of his bureau and saw the pile of papers
awaiting him, it was as if he had passed from the black skies and the
stinging wind and the dull maze of the suburb into all the warmth and
sunlight and violent color of the south.

VI

It was in this winter after his coming to the grey street that Lucian
first experienced the pains of desolation. He had all his life known the
delights of solitude, and had acquired that habit of mind which makes a
man find rich company on the bare hillside and leads him into the heart
of the wood to meditate by the dark waterpools. But now in the blank
interval when he was forced to shut up his desk, the sense of loneliness
overwhelmed him and filled him with unutterable melancholy. On such days
he carried about with him an unceasing gnawing torment in his breast; the
anguish of the empty page awaiting him in his bureau, and the knowledge
that it was worse than useless to attempt the work. He had fallen into
the habit of always using this phrase "the work" to denote the adventure
of literature; it had grown in his mind to all the austere and grave
significance of "the great work" on the lips of the alchemists; it
included every trifling and laborious page and the vague magnificent
fancies that sometimes hovered below him. All else had become mere
by-play, unimportant, trivial; the work was the end, and the means and
the food of his life--it raised him up in the morning to renew the
struggle, it was the symbol which charmed him as he lay down at night.
All through the hours of toil at the bureau he was enchanted, and when he
went out and explored the unknown coasts, the one thought allured him,
and was the colored glass between his eyes and the world. Then as he drew
nearer home his steps would quicken, and the more weary and grey the
walk, the more he rejoiced as he thought of his hermitage and of the
curious difficulties that awaited him there. But when, suddenly and
without warning, the faculty disappeared, when his mind seemed a hopeless
waste from which nothing could arise, then he became subject to
a misery so piteous that the barbarians themselves would have been sorry
for him. He had known some foretaste of these bitter and inexpressible
griefs in the old country days, but th