ening, when there was some coolness, but during the
greater part of the day they were practically imprisoned by the heat.

Gloria watched the strong man and wondered at his power of working under
any circumstances. He was laborious as well as industrious. He often
wrote a page over two and three times, in the hope of improving it, and
he was capable of spending an hour in finding a quotation from a great
writer, not for the sake of quoting it, but in order to satisfy himself
that he had authority for using some particular construction of phrase.
He kept notebooks in which he made long indexed lists of words which in
common language were improperly used, with examples showing how they
should be rightly employed.

"I am constructing a superiority for myself," he said once. "No one
living takes so much pains as I do."

But Gloria had no faith in his painstaking ways, though she wondered at
his unflagging perseverance. Her own single great talent lay in her
singing, and she had never given herself any trouble about it. Reanda,
too, though he worked carefully and often slowly, worked without effort.
It was true that Griggs never showed fatigue, but that was due to his
amazing bodily strength. The intellectual labour was apparent, however,
and he always seemed to be painfully overcoming some almost unyielding
difficulty by sheer force of steady application, though nothing came of
it, so far as she could see.

"I cannot understand why you take so much trouble," she said. "They are
only newspaper articles, after all, to be read to-day and forgotten
to-morrow."

"I am learning to write," he answered. "It takes a long time to learn
anything unless one has a great gift, as you have for singing. I have
failed with one book, but I will not fail with another. The next will
not be an extraordinary book, but it will succeed."

Nothing could disturb him, and he sat at his table day after day. He was
moved by the strongest incentives which can act upon a man, at the time
when he himself is strongest; namely, necessity and love. Even Gloria
could never discover whether he had what she would have called ambition.
He himself said that he had none, and she compared him with Reanda, who
believed in the divinity of art, the temple of fame, and the reality of
glory.

In the young man's nature, Gloria had taken the place of all other
divinities, real and imaginary. His enduring nature could no more be
wearied in its worship of her than i