tom he felt
that it would have been better taste in the generous youths to have left
them out of the question.

In the end he never answered his correspondents in the handsome way he
had fancied. Generally he did not answer them at all, or, if he did, he
put them off with some such cheap excuse as advising them to be sure
they had something to say, and then to say it as simply and clearly as
they could. He knew very well that this was begging the question; that
the question was how to be artistic, graceful, charming, and whatever
else they said he himself was. If he was aware of not being all that, he
was aware also of having tried to be it; of having sought from the
beginning to captivate the reader's fancy as well as convince his
reason. He had never been satisfied with being plain and direct; he had
constantly wished to amuse as well as edify, and following the line of
beauty, as that of the least resistance, had been his practice if not
his precept. If he counselled his correspondents otherwise, he would be
uncandid, and when he had imagined putting them off in that fashion he
was more ashamed than he had been with their praise.

Yet, upon reflection, he perceived that what they asked was impossible.
If ever he had a formula he had lost it; he was no longer in his own
secret, if ever he had been. All that he could have said with perfect
honesty would have been that he had never found any royal road to
literature; that to his experience there was not even a common highway;
that there were only byways; private paths over other people's grounds;
easements beaten out by feet that had passed before, and giving by a
subsequent overgrowth of turf or brambles a deceitful sense of discovery
to the latest-comer.

His correspondents would not have liked that. He knew that what they
wanted was his measure of the old success in some new way, which they
could feel their own after it had been shown them. But the only secret
that he was still in was the very open one of working hard at whatever
he had in hand, and this he suspected they would have scorned sharing
with him. He could have said that if you want to keep three or five
balls in the air at once you must learn how by practising; but they knew
that as well as he; what they asked was being enabled to do it
themselves from _his_ having practised.

The perception of this fact made Eugenio very sad, and he asked himself
if the willingness to arrive only after you had got th