earer, picking
up literary corpses by the wayside. They were thickly strewn. He was
appalled to find how faintly beat the pulse of life even in the living.
Would not another generation see the burial of them all? Was there no
new Immortal anywhere?

"When I write a novel," thought the professor solemnly, "which, please
God, I shall never do, I will write about people and not about things.
Things change always; people never." It was a wise conclusion but it
did not help the afternoon to pass.

Desire, that is to say Miss Farr, had passed the window twice already.
He might have called her. But he hadn't. If people forget one's very
existence it is not prideful to call them. And the Spences are a
prideful race. Desire (he decided it didn't matter if he called her
Desire to himself, she was such a child) was wearing--an old tweed coat
and was carrying wood. She wore no hat and her hair was glossy with
rain.... People take such silly risks--And where was Li Ho? Why
wasn't he carrying the wood? Not that the wood seemed to bother Desire
in the least.

The captive on the sofa sighed. It was no use trying to hide from
himself his longing to be out there with her in that heavenly
Spring-pierced air, revelling in its bloomy wetness; strong and fit in
muscle and nerve, carrying wood, getting his head soaked, doing all the
foolish things which youth does with impunity and careless joy. The new
restlessness, which he had come so far to quiet, broke over him in
miserable, taunting waves.

Why was he here on the sofa instead of out there in the rain? The war?
But he was too inherently honest to blame the war. It was, perhaps,
responsible for the present state of his sciatic nerve but not for the
selling of his birthright of sturdy youth. The causes of that lay far
behind the war. Had he not refused himself to youth when youth had
called? Had he not shut himself behind study doors while Spring crept
in at the window? The war had come and dragged him out. Across his
quiet, ordered path its red trail had stretched and to go forward it
had been necessary to go through. The Spences always went through. But
Nature, every inch a woman, had made him pay for scorning her. She had
killed no fatted calf for her prodigal.

So here he was, at thirty-five, envying a girl who could carry wood
without weariness. The envy had become acute irritation by the time the
wood was stacked and the wood-carrier brought her shining hair and
rain-tinted ch