othing now remained possible but a steady growth of good, green stalk
and leaf. For these reasons, and for others, Katharine had her moments
of despondency. The glorious past, in which men and women grew to
unexampled size, intruded too much upon the present, and dwarfed it too
consistently, to be altogether encouraging to one forced to make her
experiment in living when the great age was dead.

She was drawn to dwell upon these matters more than was natural, in the
first place owing to her mother's absorption in them, and in the second
because a great part of her time was spent in imagination with the dead,
since she was helping her mother to produce a life of the great poet.
When Katharine was seventeen or eighteen--that is to say, some ten years
ago--her mother had enthusiastically announced that now, with a daughter
to help her, the biography would soon be published. Notices to this
effect found their way into the literary papers, and for some time
Katharine worked with a sense of great pride and achievement.

Lately, however, it had seemed to her that they were making no way at
all, and this was the more tantalizing because no one with the ghost of
a literary temperament could doubt but that they had materials for one
of the greatest biographies that has ever been written. Shelves and
boxes bulged with the precious stuff. The most private lives of the
most interesting people lay furled in yellow bundles of close-written
manuscript. In addition to this Mrs. Hilbery had in her own head as
bright a vision of that time as now remained to the living, and could
give those flashes and thrills to the old words which gave them almost
the substance of flesh. She had no difficulty in writing, and covered a
page every morning as instinctively as a thrush sings, but nevertheless,
with all this to urge and inspire, and the most devout intention
to accomplish the work, the book still remained unwritten. Papers
accumulated without much furthering their task, and in dull moments
Katharine had her doubts whether they would ever produce anything at all
fit to lay before the public. Where did the difficulty lie? Not in their
materials, alas! nor in their ambitions, but in something more profound,
in her own inaptitude, and above all, in her mother's temperament.
Katharine would calculate that she had never known her write for more
than ten minutes at a time. Ideas came to her chiefly when she was in
motion. She liked to perambulate th