had left them. He
knew that there was the motive of his refusal; he had been unwilling to
abandon all hope of the work. The glory and the torment of his ambition
glowed upon him as he looked at the manuscript; it seemed so pitiful
that such a single desire should be thwarted. He was aware that if he
chose to sit down now before the desk he could, in a manner, write easily
enough--he could produce a tale which would be formally well constructed
and certain of favorable reception. And it would not be the utterly
commonplace, entirely hopeless favorite of the circulating library; it
would stand in those ranks where the real thing is skillfully
counterfeited, amongst the books which give the reader his orgy of
emotions, and yet contrive to be superior, and "art," in his opinion.
Lucian had often observed this species of triumph, and had noted the
acclamation that never failed the clever sham. _Romola_, for example,
had made the great host of the serious, the portentous, shout for joy,
while the real book, _The Cloister and the Hearth_, was a comparative
failure.

He knew that he could write a _Romola_; but he thought the art of
counterfeiting half-crowns less detestable than this shabby trick of
imitating literature. He had refused definitely to enter the atelier of
the gentleman who pleased his clients by ingeniously simulating the grain
of walnut; and though he had seen the old oaken ambry kicked out
contemptuously into the farmyard, serving perhaps the necessities of hens
or pigs, he would not apprentice himself to the masters of veneer. He
paced up and down the room, glancing now and again at his papers, and
wondering if there were not hope for him. A great thing he could never
do, but he had longed to do a true thing, to imagine sincere and genuine
pages.

He was stirred again to this fury for the work by the event of the
evening before, by all that had passed through his mind since the
melancholy dawn. The lurid picture of that fiery street, the flaming
shops and flaming glances, all its wonders and horrors, lit by the
naphtha flares and by the burning souls, had possessed him; and the
noises, the shriek and the whisper, the jangling rattle of the
piano-organ, the long-continued scream of the butcher as he dabbled in
the blood, the lewd litany of the singers, these seemed to be resolved
into an infernal overture, loud with the expectation of lust and death.
And how the spectacle was set in the cloud of dark night,