How bright that morning the sun lay on the housetops and chimneys, and how the elevated trains whisked and danced and frolicked past his vibrating window! The dust that hung over the city seemed a mantle of soft gold. The smell of the open street was a new perfume to him. He went back to his work happy, light-hearted, assured. He felt come over him a new sense of power and freedom. With it the fires of creation seemed to burn and rage within him. For all time the week that followed remained a blurred and vague memory to him--a memory of hurried and half-eaten meals of chuck steak and strong coffee, of much tobacco-smoke, of feverish snatches at the fresh air by night, of unsettled sleep and an aching anxiety to be once more at work. His brain seemed to have taken the bit in its teeth and run away with him, though not, he knew, as Cordelia's had once bolted despairingly over the same pages. When several days later he received a plaintive little note from that lady herself, it remained unnoticed. Little Pietro Salvatore crept timidly up to see him, but was not admitted. He could give no time to the empty graces and accidents of life. He was in the world of the spirit. The man in him flickered and went out; and the creator, the artist, awoke, and taking possession of his soul, claimed its own. How long this mood, or madness--he did not stop to ask which it was--might have lasted he could never tell. But early one day a sharp pounding on his door angered him unreasonably. When it had sounded for the third time he answered it, and found a uniformed messenger-boy with a note from Cordelia. He tossed it aside, and plunged once more into his work. But three hours later he was interrupted again. This time it was a telegram. He opened it belligerently and read it. It was from Cordelia. He remembered that her note had asked something about when he could get up to see her. Now she had wired, "You must come at once." Hartley sighed wearily. Then he walked his room resentfully. Then, like one awakening from a long sleep, he rubbed his eyes and looked abstractedly up and down his litter of manuscript and notes. He tried to go back to them, but some hand seemed leashing in his whimpering ideas. The spell was broken. He sat back in his chair and stretched himself wearily. He pictured a pale oval face, with its abundance of massed golden-yellow hair like a great crown, and remembered the little hands that seemed to flutter about like butterfly wings. And all at once his room stood before him an unspeakably squalid and lonely place. He wondered why he had been penning himself up for so long.