o--and willed himself to like
milk and sugar, and snow and cold, and short days!

In his writing he began to see progress. He was like a musical person
beginning to learn an instrument; for, just as surely as there are
scales to be run upon the piano before your virtuoso can weave music,
binding the gallery gods with delicious meshes of sound, so in
prose-writing there must be scales run, fingerings worked out, and
harmonies mastered. For in a page of _lo bello stile_ you will find
trills and arpeggios, turns, grace notes, a main theme, a sub theme,
thorough-bass, counterpoint, and form.

Music is an easier art than prose, however. It comes to men as a more
direct and concrete gift of those gods who delight in sound and the
co-ordination of parts. The harmonies are more quickly grasped by the
well-tuned ear. We can imagine the boy Mozart discoursing lovely music
at the age of five; but we cannot imagine any one of such tender years
compiling even a fifth-rate paragraph of prose.

Those men who have mastered _lo bello stile_ in music can tell us pretty
clearly how the thing is done. There be rules. But your prose masters
either cannot formulate what they have learned--or will not.

G. G. was very patient; and there were times when the putting together
of words was fascinating, like the putting together of those picture
puzzles which were such a fad the other day. And such reading as he did
was all in one book--the dictionary. For hours, guided by his nice ear
for sound, he applied himself to learning the derivatives and exact
meanings of new words--or he looked up old words and found that they
were new.

As for his actual compositions, he had only the ambition to make them as
workmanlike as he could. He made little landscapes; he drew little
interiors. He tried to get people up and down stairs in the fewest words
that would make the picture. And when he thought that he had scored a
little success he would count the number of words he had used and
determine to achieve the same effect with the use of only half that
number.

Well, G. G.'s lung healed again; and this time he was very careful not
to overdo. He had gained nine pounds, he wrote to Cynthia--"saved them"
was the way he put it; and he was determined that this new tissue, worth
more than its weight in gold, should go to bank and earn interest for
him--and compound interest.

"Shall I get well?" he asked that great dreamer who dreamed that there
was hope fo