and
irritable. He had acquired a nervous habit of secretly rubbing his
thumbs swiftly over his finger-tips when Doria, in her pride, spoke of
his work, which amounted almost to ill-breeding. It was only late at
night during our last smoke that he assumed a semblance of the old
Adrian; and by that time he had consumed as much champagne and brandy as
would have rendered jocose the prophet Jeremiah.

He was suffering, poor fellow, from a nervous breakdown. From Doria we
learned the cause. For the last three months he had been working at
insane pressure. At seven he rose; at a quarter to eight he
breakfasted; at half past he betook himself to his ascetic workroom and
remained there till half-past one. At four o'clock he began a three-hour
spell of work. At night a four hours' spell--from nine to one, if they
had no evening engagement, from midnight to four o'clock in the morning
if they had been out.

"But, my darling child!" cried Barbara, aghast when she heard of this
maniacal time-table, "you must put your foot down. You mustn't let him
do it. He is killing himself."

"No man," said I, in warm support of my wife, "can go on putting out
creative work for more than four hours a day. Quite famous novelists
whom I meet at the Athenaeum have told me so themselves. Even prodigious
people like Sir Walter Scott and Zola--"

"Yes, yes," said Doria. "But they were not Adrian. Every artist must be
a law to himself. Adrian's different. Why--those two that you've
mentioned--they slung out stuff by the bucketful. It didn't matter to
them what they wrote. But Adrian has to get the rhythm and the balance
and the beauty of every sentence he writes--to say nothing of the
subtlety of his analysis and the perfect drawing of his pictures. My
dear, good people"--she threw out her hands in an impatient
gesture--"you don't know what you're talking about. How can you? It's
impossible for you to conceive--it's almost impossible even for me to
conceive--the creative workings of the mind of a man of genius. Four
hours a day! Your mechanical fiction-monger, yes. Four hours a day is
stamped all over the slack drivel they publish. But you can't imagine
that work like Adrian's is to be done in this dead mechanical way."

"It is you that don't quite understand," I protested. "My admiration for
Adrian's genius is second to none but yours. But I repeat that no human
brain since the beginning of time has been capable of spinning cobwebs
of fancy for