“If he had had luck, he wouldn’t have lied. He would have been prettier if he had been incapable of lying; but if he hadn’t needed to lie, you never would have known that he wasn’t as pretty as any one else. You’re quite right, of course. I’m not asking you to love Paramore, but I advise you to understand him as well as you can. You’ll find the whole business easier.” “Say what you have made up your mind to say.” I couldn’t, at the moment, go further than that. Hoyting swung back, as if there had been no interruption, as if I had been pleading with him not to stop. “One day, when the despair was thickest, he had an idea. He may have been a little off his head, you know.... He wouldn’t confess his failure at all. He would let his imagination play over those note-books; he would supply from his generous brain everything that was needed. A good deal of it was new country, quite aboriginal and nasty, and his learning was sufficient to warn him off ground that had been authentically covered. It was also sufficient to keep him magnificently plausible. He would take his meagre gleanings to some secluded spot, and he would return to England with the completed sheaf. He would squeeze the last drop of significance out of every detail he had learned; and if he were put to it, he would invent. ‘No, not invent, exactly,’ he corrected himself when he told me. ‘I would draw conclusions and parallels; I would state probabilities as facts; and I would put in some--a very few--of the things I suspected but had no proof of. And then I would contradict a few things.’ “Those were his words, describing that ancient intention of his. ‘My pen got away with me,’ he confessed; ‘and the lust of making a beautiful book. There were things that occurred to me--I put them in. Any one who knows any folk-lore can make up customs with his eyes shut. After a little, you get to feel that if the beastly creatures didn’t do it that way they must be awful fools. And then you get to believe that they did. But I marked everything on the margin of my own manuscript as I wrote it, true or not true, inferred or just invented. That was later--much later--at Whitaker’s place.’ “I give you some of his words that I remember, you see. I don’t remember much. But that was the gist of his great confession. He had the idea--his one way to snap his fingers at luck. Until he got into the work, he didn’t know how his idea would dominate him. He first had the notion of putting just enough alloy into his book to give it body. In the end his idea rode him--and damned him. I’m leaving out a lot, but you can work that out for yourself--how his inspiration would have come, and what would have happened.” “But what about his scientific passion? That has nothing to do with the ‘lust of making a beautiful book’--quite the contrary.” “Wait till I’ve finished. Now comes Eve. _Place aux dames!_ ...