by rising imperturbably triumphant over zero. . . .
Or perhaps he shews that he is an eternal sex-amateur._ . . ."--From
the Diary of Eric Lane.

CHAPTER SEVEN

EDUCATION FOR THOSE OF RIPER YEARS

"Verily when an author can approve his wife she was deserving of a
better fate."
LEONARD MERRICK: "WHEN LOVE FLIES OUT O' THE WINDOW."

1

"After diagnosis," said Dr. Gaisford, "the prudent physician bases
treatment on self-interest. You're not fit to travel by yourself yet,
Eric; when I've patched you up, I shall send you away. If you don't go,
you'll never do any decent work again."

Having persuaded his patient to stay in bed for a week, the doctor
looked in nightly "for five minutes" and stayed sixty-five, smoking
three disreputable pipes instead of one and generalizing on life and
health.

"It gives me a headache even to think of work," said Eric, his brain
half-paralyzed with bromide.

Perhaps it was the bromide, perhaps it was his nervous and bodily
exhaustion; the most frightening part of this latest illness was the
attendant utter incapacity to make up his mind. When Barbara left him
for Crawleigh Abbey, he had resigned from his department and withdrawn
the resignation, accepted an invitation to lecture in America--and
cancelled the acceptance; every night he led Gaisford through the same
argumentative maze; complete rest, partial rest in London or the
country, flight from England and all association with Barbara, full
work--as soon as he could resume it--to keep him from brooding about
her; he could not decide. And from time to time a mocking refrain told
him that as an undergraduate and again in the first flush of fame he had
aspired to be the new young Byron, dominating London. . . .

"Poisoned rat in a hole," he whispered to himself. . . .

Gaisford would sit with his arms crossed over the back of a chair and
his feet twisted round its legs, puffing thoughtfully at his pipe and
frowning at his boots. In a long experience of practice among rich and
self-conscious patients who would always rather be "interesting" than
normal, it was not the first time that he had watched the bloom being
rubbed off love; nine broken engagements and balked romances were born
of doltish delay; but a mass of sensibility like Eric Lane had not the
stamina to wait nor the placidity to go away and forget.

"You told me you had a novel on the stocks," said Gaisford. "I suppose
you wouldn't