en he had immediately taken refuge
in the hills, he had rushed to the dark woods as to an anodyne, letting
his heart drink in all the wonder and magic of the wild land. Now in
these days of January, in the suburban street, there was no such refuge.

He had been working steadily for some weeks, well enough satisfied on the
whole with the daily progress, glad to awake in the morning, and to read
over what he had written on the night before. The new year opened with
faint and heavy weather and a breathless silence in the air, but in a few
days the great frost set in. Soon the streets began to suggest the
appearance of a beleaguered city, the silence that had preceded the
frost deepened, and the mist hung over the earth like a dense white
smoke. Night after night the cold increased, and people seemed unwilling
to go abroad, till even the main thoroughfares were empty and deserted,
as if the inhabitants were lying close in hiding. It was at this dismal
time that Lucian found himself reduced to impotence. There was a sudden
break in his thought, and when he wrote on valiantly, hoping against
hope, he only grew more aghast on the discovery of the imbecilities he
had committed to paper. He ground his teeth together and persevered, sick
at heart, feeling as if all the world were fallen from under his feet,
driving his pen on mechanically, till he was overwhelmed. He saw the
stuff he had done without veil or possible concealment, a lamentable and
wretched sheaf of verbiage, worse, it seemed, than the efforts of his
boyhood. He was not longer tautological, he avoided tautology with the
infernal art of a leader-writer, filling his wind bags and mincing words
as if he had been a trained journalist on the staff of the _Daily Post_.
There seemed all the matter of an insufferable tragedy in these thoughts;
that his patient and enduring toil was in vain, that practice went for
nothing, and that he had wasted the labor of Milton to accomplish the
tenth-rate. Unhappily he could not "give in"; the longing, the fury for
the work burnt within him like a burning fire; he lifted up his eyes in
despair.

It was then, while he knew that no one could help him, that he languished
for help, and then, though he was aware that no comfort was possible, he
fervently wished to be comforted. The only friend he had was his father,
and he knew that his father would not even understand his distress. For
him, always, the printed book was the beginning and en