Yet, for all her wonder, she brought her swift intelligence to the task of criticism. Not since her mother’s illness had she taken anything so seriously. She lived in the book, walking meanwhile through an unreal world. Her golden words, on the other hand, the young man captured eagerly and set down in the margin of the manuscript. Half-way through the reading, they were on terms of Christian names. Minds so absorbed in an artistic pursuit grew impatient of absurd formalities of address. They slipped almost imperceptibly into the Olivia and Alexis habit. At the end they pulled themselves up rather sharply, with blank looks at an immediate future bereft of common interest. “I’ll have to begin another, right away, so that you can be with me from the very start,” he said. “Have you an idea?” “Not yet.” “When will you have one?” He didn’t know. What man spent with the creative effort of a novel has the vitality to beget another right away? He feels that the very last drop of all that he has known and suffered and enjoyed has been used to the making of the book. For the making of another nothing is left. “I suppose I’ll have to lie fallow for a week or so,” said the young optimist. “And as soon as things begin to sprout you’ll let me know?” asked Olivia, forgetful that before harvest there must be seed time. He promised; went home and cudgelled tired brains; also cudgelled, for different reasons, an untired and restless soul. Let him make good, not ephemerally as the picturesque narrator of personal adventure, but definitely, with this novel as the creative artist—the fervent passion of his life—and he would establish himself in her eyes, in her mind, in her heart; so that treading solid ground, he could say to her: “This is what I am, and for what I am, take me. All that has gone before was but a crude foundation. I had to take such rubbish and rubble as I could find to hand.” But until then, let him regard her as a divinity beyond his reach, rendering her service and worship, but forbearing to soil her white robe with a touch as yet unhallowed. Many a time, they could have read no more that day. Just one swift movement, glance or cry on the part of the man, and the pulses of youth would have throbbed wildly together. He knew it. The knowledge was at once his Heaven and his Hell. A less sensitive human being would not have appreciated the quivering and vital equipoise. Many a time he parted from her with the farewell of comradely intimacy on his lips, and when the lift had deposited him on the street level his heart had been like lead and his legs as water, so that he stumbled out into the lamp-lit dark of night like a paralytic or a drunken man.