Pity that the conditions of waking life are so singularly limited. At first it had been only a simple question of time and space. Not that Flossie took up so very much space; and he owned that she left him plenty of time for the everyday work that paid. But where was that divine solitude? Where were those long days of nebulous conception? Where the days when he removed himself, as it were, and watched his full-orbed creations careering in the intellectual void? The days when Keith Rickman was as a god? He was hardly aware how fast they were vanishing already; and where would they be in two months' time? It was on his tragedy that he based his hopes for his future; the future, in which Flossie had no part. He knew that the plea of art sounded weak before the inexorable claims of nature; he felt that something ought to be sacrificed to the supreme passion; but he couldn't give up his tragedy. He was consumed by two indomitable passions; and who was to say which of them was supreme? Still, tragedies in blank verse were a luxury; and Flossie had more than once pointed out to him he couldn't afford luxuries. He would sit up working on the tragedy till long past midnight; and when he woke in the morning his sense of guilt could not have been greater if he had been indulging in the most hateful orgies. But you can't burn even genius at both ends; and his paying work began to suffer. Jewdwine complained that it was not up to his usual level. Maddox had returned several articles. So at last he stuffed his tragedy into a drawer to wait there for a diviner hour. "That would have been a big expensive job," he said to himself. "I suppose it's possible to put as good work into the little things that pay; but I shall have to cut myself in pieces." That was what he was doing now; changing his gold into copper as fast as he could, so many pennies for one sovereign. Nobody was cheated. He knew that in his talent (his mere journalistic talent) there was a genius that no amount of journalism had as yet subdued. But he had an awful vision of the future, when he saw himself swallowed up body and soul in journalism. The gods were dead; but there were still men and columns. That would be the inevitable surrender to reality. To have no part in the triumph of the poetic legions; but to march with the rank and file, to a detestable music not his own; a mere mercenary ingloriously fighting in a foreign cause.