But the end came at last, and he awoke one evening and discovered that his face had been unshaved for days, that his eyes were bloodshot and sunken, that he was hollow of cheek and shaken of nerve, and that he was unspeakably hungry. His brain seemed a sponge that had been squeezed dry, to the last bitter drop, and he felt old, listless, worn out. But even through that dull pain of fatigue he felt the mysterious and inextinguishable flame of happiness, of triumph in accomplishment. All his work, he knew, was not yet done, but the pill was there, as he put it, and the sugar coating could be applied later, and at his leisure. The structure was there; he could take his own time and go in his own way about the removal of the scaffolding. But the days of sweat and noise were done. That was the way, he felt, that he would always have to write, racing on to the end, with the wind in his ears while it lasted. It was a costly way, perhaps, and an unsafe one; but with him it would always have to be the only way. A sense of the mystery of creation had seized him at times, the thought that the thing born of the travail of the mind came not from within, but from some unknown source without; that it was inspirational; that it was the cry of a voice not always his own. With the hand of this mystery Hartley tried to brush away the incongruity that existed between The Silver Poppy and the character of the woman who had written it. Cordelia herself, he argued, might have known her moments of spiritual metamorphosis. Into her fingers, too, might have been thrust a tool more potent than the hand that held it. Yet he felt that his work was his own, and as his own he took an indefinable, jealous pride of ownership in it. But it had been done for another; and if in this case the tool had fallen to him and had been denied her, how little less hers than his, he tried to tell himself, were the pages before him. Some busy little spider of delusion seemed to have woven its web across a corner of his mind, and he could not think the problem out as he wished to. Then the reaction set in. He went out into the freshness of the night air, hoping to brush away that tenuous film of doubt and bewilderment that still teased his thoughts. His face was flushed and hot, but a chill, beginning in his limbs, had seized his body, and tingling little feet of ice seemed running up and down his back. He sniffed at the fresh river air, and remembered that he had taken no exercise of late, that the engine, as Repellier called it, had been overdriven and neglected. He had a sudden desire to get away from the quietness and loneliness that hung about him. He wanted to get down into the thick of the city and feel life pressing against his sides.