I glanced with pleasure at the ample tables, the sheets of thick blotting-paper, the rulers, sealing-wax, paper-knives, and all the other immaculate paraphernalia. ‘It’s perfect,’ I answered with a secret thrill, yet feeling a little foolish. This was for Gibbon or Carlyle, rather than for my pot-boiling insignificancies. ‘If I can’t write masterpieces here, it’s certainly not _your_ fault,’ and I turned with gratitude to Mrs. Franklyn. She was looking straight at me, and there was a question in her small pale eyes I did not understand. Was she noting the effect upon me, I wondered? ‘You’ll write here--perhaps a story about the house,’ she said; ‘Thompson will bring you anything you want; you only have to ring.’ She pointed to the electric bell on the central table, the wire running neatly down the leg. ‘No one has ever worked here before, and the library has been hardly used since it was put in. So there’s no previous atmosphere to affect your imagination--er--adversely.’ We laughed. ‘Bill isn’t that sort,’ said my sister; while I wished they would go out and leave me to arrange my little nest and set to work. I thought, of course, it was the huge listening library that made me feel so inconsiderable--the fifteen thousand silent, staring books, the solemn aisles, the deep, eloquent shelves. But when the women had gone and I was alone, the beginning of the truth crept over me, and I felt that first hint of disconsolateness which later became an imperative No. The mind shut down, images ceased to rise and flow. I read, made copious notes, but I wrote no single line at The Towers. Nothing completed itself there. Nothing happened.