And so he had--oh! so he had! What cruel irony that because his mind was set to winning Clare back to him the chief means for gaining her should be ruined by his very care for her. What to do when all the things of life--the bustle and hurry, the marriages and births and deaths--came in between him and his work so that he could scarcely see it, so many things obscured the way. Poor Mortimer! Lost indeed behind a shifting, whirring cloud of real life--never to emerge, poor man, into anything better than a middle-aged clothes' prop. For six weeks the book lingered in the advertisements. A second edition, composed for the most part of an edition for America, was announced, there were a belated review or two ... and then the end. The end of two years' hopes, ambitions, struggles, sweat and tears--and the end, too, of how much else? From the beginning, so far back as he could remember, he had believed that he would one day write great books; had believed it from no conceit in him but simply because he clung so tenaciously to ambition that it had become, again and again, almost realised in the intensity of his dreams of it. He had known that this achievement of his would take a long time, that he must meet with many rebuffs, that he must starve and despair and be born again, but, never at any moment, until now, had he, in his heart of hearts, doubted that that great book was in front of him. He had seen his work, in his dreams, derided, flouted, misunderstood. That was the way with most good work, but what he had never seen was its acceptance amongst the ranks of the “Pretty Good,” its place given it beside that rising and falling tide of fiction that covered every year the greedy rocks of the circulating libraries and ebbed out again leaving no trace behind it. Now, after the failure of “Mortimer Stant” for the first time, this awful question--“What if, after all, you should be an Ordinary Creature? What if you are no better than that army who fights happily, contentedly, with mediocrity for its daily bread and butter? That army, upon whose serried ranks you have perhaps, unconsciously, but nevertheless with pity, looked down?... What if you are never to write a word that will be remembered, never even to cause a decent attention, amongst your own generation?” What if after all this stir and fluster, this pain and agony and striving, there should be nothing exceptional about Peter? What rock to stand on then? He had never, perhaps, analysed his feelings about it all. He had certainly never thought himself an exceptional person ... but always in his heart there had been that belief that, one day, he would write an exceptional book.