but I am not asking much of you;
dump her down as often as you like."

And Thomas did his dogged best, the red light in his eye; though he
had not, and never could have had, the smallest instinct for
story-writing, he knew to the finger-tips how it is done; but for ever
he would have gone on breaking all the rules of the game. How he
wrestled with himself! Sublime thoughts came to him (nearly all about
that girl), and he drove them away, for he knew they beat only against
the march of his story, and, whatever befall, the story must march.
Relentlessly he followed in the track of his men, pushing the dreary
dogs on to deeds of valour. He tried making the lady human, and then
she would not march; she sat still, and he talked about her; he
dumped her down, and soon he was yawning. This weariness was what
alarmed him most, for well he understood that there could be no
treasure where the work was not engrossing play, and he doubted no
more than Pym that for him the treasure was in the tale or nowhere.
Had he not been sharpening his tools in this belief for years? Strange
to reflect now that all the time he was hacking and sweating at that
novel (the last he ever attempted) it was only marching towards the
waste-paper basket!

He had a fine capacity, as has been hinted, for self-deception, and in
time, of course, he found a way of dodging the disquieting truth.
This, equally of course, was by yielding to his impulses. He allowed
himself an hour a day, when Pym was absent, in which he wrote the
story as it seemed to want to write itself, and then he cut this piece
out, which could be done quite easily, as it consisted only of
moralizings. Thus was his day brightened, and with this relaxation to
look forward to be plodded on at his proper work, delving so hard that
he could avoid asking himself why he was still delving. What shall we
say? He was digging for the treasure in an orchard, and every now and
again he came out of his hole to pluck an apple; but though the apple
was so sweet to the mouth, it never struck him that the treasure
might be growing overhead. At first he destroyed the fruit of his
stolen hour, and even after he took to carrying it about fondly in his
pocket, and to rewriting it in a splendid new form that had come to
him just as he was stepping into bed, he continued to conceal it from
his overseer's eyes. And still he thought all was over with him when
Pym said the story did not march.

"It is a dead th