It is often reproachfully said that one "makes copy" of himself and his friends--that nothing is too intimately sacred to be seized upon and dissected in print. Not so long ago, it was said that a certain man was "botanising on his mother's grave," a pardonable confusion, perhaps, of facts and realities. The bitter truth is that the writer lives his books--and not much else. From title to colophon, he escapes no pang, misses no joy. The life of the book is his from beginning to end. At the close of it, he has lived what his dream people have lived and borne the sorrows of half a dozen entire lifetimes, mercilessly concentrated into the few short months of writing. One by one, his former pleasures vanish. Even the divine consolation of books is partly if not wholly gone. Behind the printed page, he sees ever the machinery of composition, the preparation for climax, the repetition in its proper place, the introduction and interweaving of major and minor, of theme and contrast. For the fine, glowing fancy of the other man has not appeared in his book, and to the eye of the fellow-craftsman only the mechanism is there. Mask-like, the author stands behind his Punch-and-Judy box, twitching the strings that move his marionettes, heedless of the fact that in his audience there must be a few who know him surely for what he is. If only the transfiguring might of the Vision could be put into print, there would be little in the world save books. Happily heedless of the mockery of it all, Harlan laboured on, destined fully to sense his entire payment much later, suffer vicariously for a few hours on account of it, then to forget. Dorothy, meanwhile, was learning a hard lesson. Harlan's changeless preoccupation hurt her cruelly, but, woman-like, she considered it a manifestation of genius and endeavoured to be proud accordingly. It had not occurred to her that there could ever be anything in Harlan's thought into which she was not privileged to go. She had thought of marriage as a sort of miraculous welding of two individualities into one, and was perceiving that it changed nothing very much; that souls went on their way unaltered. She saw, too, that there was no one in the wide world who could share her every mood and tense, that ultimately each one of us lives and dies alone, within the sanctuary of his own inner self, cheered only by some passing mood of friend or stranger, which chances to chime with his. It was Dick who, blindly enough, helped her over many a hard place, and quickened her sense of humour into something upon which she might securely lean. He was too young and too much occupied with the obvious to look further, but he felt that Dorothy was troubled, and that it was his duty, as a man and a gentleman, to cheer her up.