merely
felt that the fact of his having chosen a job and stuck to it, if only
through a few rosy summer weeks, had already given him a new way of
saying "Yes" and "No."

VII.

OF some new ferment at work in him Nick Lansing himself was equally
aware. He was a better judge of the book he was trying to write than
either Susy or Strefford; he knew its weaknesses, its treacheries,
its tendency to slip through his fingers just as he thought his grasp
tightest; but he knew also that at the very moment when it seemed to
have failed him it would suddenly be back, beating its loud wings in his
face.

He had no delusions as to its commercial value, and had winced more than
he triumphed when Susy produced her allusion to Marius. His book was to
be called The Pageant of Alexander. His imagination had been enchanted
by the idea of picturing the young conqueror's advance through the
fabulous landscapes of Asia: he liked writing descriptions, and vaguely
felt that under the guise of fiction he could develop his theory of
Oriental influences in Western art at the expense of less learning than
if he had tried to put his ideas into an essay. He knew enough of his
subject to know that he did not know enough to write about it; but he
consoled himself by remembering that Wilhelm Meister has survived many
weighty volumes on aesthetics; and between his moments of self-disgust
he took himself at Susy's valuation, and found an unmixed joy in his
task.

Never--no, never!--had he been so boundlessly, so confidently happy. His
hack-work had given him the habit of application, and now habit wore the
glow of inspiration. His previous literary ventures had been timid and
tentative: if this one was growing and strengthening on his hands, it
must be because the conditions were so different. He was at ease, he was
secure, he was satisfied; and he had also, for the first time since his
early youth, before his mother's death, the sense of having some one to
look after, some one who was his own particular care, and to whom he
was answerable for himself and his actions, as he had never felt himself
answerable to the hurried and indifferent people among whom he had
chosen to live.

Susy had the same standards as these people: she spoke their language,
though she understood others, she required their pleasures if she did
not revere their gods. But from the moment that she had become his
property he had built up in himself a conception of her answe