"No, my dear fellow," returned Malcolm rather mendaciously, for he was planning a series of essays at that very time. "No trifles and syllabubs for me--froth above and sweetness and jam beneath. Every one writes essays nowadays, and tries to stir with his little Gulliver pen the yeasty foam raised by a Carlyle or an Emerson. One might as well watch the effort of a small hairy caterpillar to follow in the wake of a sea-serpent. Oh ye gods and little fishes, could anything be more grotesque!" "But the book?" growled Amias, with a surreptitious glance at his pipe. "Oh, the book," returned Malcolm loftily, "it is a sudden inspiration, but I feel the grip of my Frankenstein already; I have not yet let go the mantle of my guardian genius. It will be autobiographical, expansive, and deep as human nature itself, and I shall call it 'The Record of an Impotent Genius.'" "Good lack!" observed Amias in a disgusted tone, "what a drivelling title! Why impotent, in the name of all that is rational?" "My dear old Philistine," returned his friend in a measured voice, "I use the word impotent in the meaning attached to it in Holy Writ, and as my beloved and well-thumbed Thesaurus uses it: impotent, powerless, unarmed, weaponless, paralytic, crippled, inoperative, ineffectual, inadequate. Think of the strong man bound for a lifetime, Goliath--of a dumb and palsied genius gazing out of a prison-house. Could even a blinded Samson equal the pathos of such a picture?" Amias shook his head mutely, and felt a third time for his pipe, and plugged the tobacco tenderly with his finger. In some moods he never argued with Malcolm. "I shall write the autobiography of this poor tormented soul," went on Malcolm--"this dumb poet, this crippled artist, to whom the birthright of failure has descended, who has to look on for a lifetime at other men's labours, and to whom the power of expression and creation is denied, who has been gifted with the seeing eye in vain." "Oh that seeing eye!" groaned Amias, who had heard this observation at least a hundred times. Then Verity began to laugh, and, to Anna's surprise, Malcolm followed suit. Then he clapped Amias heavily on the shoulder. "Where's your pipe, Goliath? Poor old Philistine, he is a gone coon without his baccy. Fetch him a match somebody." And as Amias feebly protested against this, he went on--"Anna is quite a Bohemian, and rather likes the smell of tobacco. I will have a cigarette to keep you company," and in another minute Amias's broad countenance wore its usual expression of placid enjoyment. The conversation turned on Cedric Templeton, and Malcolm asked Verity if she could transform the lumber-room into a bedroom for two or three nights for the use of his friend. This she at once cheerfully undertook to do, and promised to have it ready by the following evening, and then he informed them of his intended visit to Staplegrove.