He is a queer boy--from the bleak fishing grounds north of Boston. He is in no hurry. You couldn't tell if he really wants anything. He doesn't seem to want much--for O'Brien.... After he had his main line and most of the ramifications of his idea laid, he told the editors to send on the stories. Most of them did. O'Brien did a lot of work in a few weeks, did it startlingly well. He started something.... Now, if a writer sits down, suddenly struck with a fine idea for a tale, and this fine idea precludes the possibility of selling it for a high price--the writer dares go ahead and finish the task, because he knows O'Brien will get to the thing in due time, and that if it is really what it seems and the performance of the idea adequate, then the work will not be utterly lost. As a matter of fact, this is a bit of self-placation, since no work is lost; no one gets the value of a big thing to anything like the degree of the man who does it; no big thing is lost from the world, not even if dropped in a sewer, if it is really important for the world to have it. We are all a bit too heavily handicapped with our own idea of what the world should have from our own shops--at the same time, when we are young, we pant for the quicker return, the answering hail within reason--at least, within time and space. Now O'Brien has come, strangely arrived, his proper phylacteries in place, the touch of tinted haze about his head, the right man. Back of all, however, is the workman's own spine. That's the best thing to lean on; and when the going is heavy, to learn to do without. We often remind each other in Chapel of the modern artist Cezanne, who moved about his painting for many years, painting _the thing_, satisfying his soul, and leaving his canvasses around in the fields for the peasants to laugh at or mull over.... They have long since been brought in out of the rain--those canvasses. I forget the incredible thousands his littlest sketch brings now.... But Cezanne got the films out of himself--tallied them off--the landscapes within and without, when it did him most good. It never fails. What was good for the artist is good for the rest of us afterward. Meanwhile much is still to do in the story world. The big smash of the moving pictures hasn't cleared from our game yet. It will be the cause of greater tales before the end is seen, for you can't portray the realities of romance upon a flat screen. For a time the many thought it was no longer necessary to learn to read, because there was such a torrent of pictures everywhere, but it was only through the pictures that the few has finally managed to realize how marvelously pictorial mere words are, and how few words are required when they are imaginatively driven. One day in Stonestudy we discussed these story and screen affairs, looking ahead somewhat to better times than these. One of our young men, whose story is told in a later chapter, put down the things we talked about. This is Shuk's writing: