Indeed, no woman can with real content permit the man whom she proprietorially cherishes, to traffic in this queer lonely realm, and she cannot but, secretly, regard his visits thereto as a personal slight. So the creative artist remains (when luckiest) at silent feud with his current wife, because both are perpetually irritated by the failure of their joint effort to ignore the fact that she ranks as an avocational interest. And the creative artist remains, at bottom, an anchorite whose actual living is given over to his diversions in a withdrawn and not over-wholesome country whereinto no other person can ever enter; and whence he, tired out for the while by his playing, deviates now and then into four-square existence--should it be only, we will say, to come down to his supper,--as a talking and laughing and amorous and blatant animal, very much as other wearied persons wander off into their dreams. § 63 What, though, the dull may wonder, was the precise goal of the fourteen years of visually unproductive "writing"? Since those first stories have not ever been printed, one may here seem to advance on a bridge of guesswork. Yet really, to the considerate, the answer is plain. In all that is to-day accessible of Mr. Hergesheimer's earlier creative feats--with one exception duly noted hereinafter,--you observe perforce an overt negligence, and indeed an ostentatious avoidance, of any aiming toward popularity. That during the fourteen years young Hergesheimer labored toward the applause and cheques of a "best-seller" becomes to the considerate inconceivable. Nor could that well, indeed, have been a motive strong enough to sustain him thus long, since the maker of reading-matter, like any other tradesman, has need of quick returns where the artist battens on immediate rejections. No: Mr. Hergesheimer's monomania, one perceives, was then to write for his own diversion. He was then playing all the while at the game the artist must always play: and doubtless he also, like the most of his confrères in diversion, devised extremely imposing titles for his self-indulgence. But the point is that here, for fourteen years, the one possible incentive for the boy to go on writing was that he enjoyed doing it. The point is that Joseph Hergesheimer, whatever his voiced pretexts or his actual intentions, gave over these fourteen years to an attestation of the fact that the main and the all-absorbing purpose of literary art is to divert the literary artist.