“That’s nearer the mark than your rash judgment and condemnation of me by a text from Mother Goose!” said Richard Latham, throwing himself appreciatively into his comfortable chair. “I was out at six and I’m nicely tired, just enough tired to want to cut work. Besides, you extracted from me yesterday everything I have to say on every known subject! I shall have to wait to fill up from whatever the sources are that supply ideas. You’re a frightful person for getting a poor fellow going and keeping him at it till you’ve got all his brains down in funny little cabalistic signs. Then the next day you write out pages and swear the utterances that fill me with awe were hidden under those inky wriggles! I don’t believe it! You insist the inky-wriggles wisdom is mine. Stuff and nonsense! Why, I don’t know a fraction of what you say I dictate to you! It’s uncanny. The only thing that I don’t understand, and which gives a tint of colour to your statement, is that I’ve no brains left after one of those frightful days when you wind me up--like yesterday! It’s all curious. Still more so that by to-morrow you’ll wind me up again, and so on, _da capo_. But not to-day, Miss Thaumaturga! Not a bit of work shall you get out of me to-day, not the least preposition for you to set down in a dash or a dot!” “Very well, Mr. Latham,” laughed Anne, resuming her seat and taking up her pen. “I have quite enough to do to write out what you gave me yesterday. It was a particularly productive day. You are right. Perhaps I shall ask you to listen to what I have when it is written. That will not be till well after lunch; shall you be ready then for me, do you think?” “No,” said Richard Latham, promptly. “I shall not be. Please put down that pen, which I’m sure you’ve taken up, and put down with it all thought of work. Unless reading aloud is work? Is it hard for you to read to me? You always assure me that you don’t mind it, but I’m afraid you may. I don’t want to be troublesome. To-day I’d like to cut work and be read to. It is quite true that I’ve brain fag, and that you did wind me up to a frightful speed yesterday. I’m conscious that it is you who do it; I wonder how? It’s precisely as if you at once put into me and took out again what would never be in my brain if you didn’t do this. Are you the poet and not I, after all?” “Hardly,” said Anne, smiling, with the woman’s instinct to mask the trouble that vaguely stirred in her, although this man could not see her face. “I am industrious, but not gifted. If I’ve any part in it, I suppose it is because you feel my delight in what you are creating, and that unconsciously urges you on. I suspect it’s no more than the simple thing we call genius, and that it takes it out of you to ride Pegasus.”