story, and correct and erase and rewrite with an unquenchable optimism. There would be moments of despair, moments of wrestling with a recalcitrant sentence, when he walked about in the blaze of the sun, and bit his pencil till his teeth cracked through into the lead, moments of triumph when the impalpable sensation he wished to record seemed to surrender itself to the embrace of verbs and adjectives. Up till teatime, when the others shuffled (or so he termed it) out of the house after their slumbers, he tasted the glories and the travail of creation, or, it might be, the pangs of fruitless labour; but he knew, at any rate, the joys of ecstatic mental activity.
On one such day, some weeks after his mother and Helena had gone back to England, he felt himself fit to burst with all that he had stored within him, ready for expression. As they drank their coffee he had employed himself in sharpening a couple of pencils (for the work of transcription into ink came later in the day), so as not to interrupt, by any physical intrusion, the flow of all he knew was ready to be crystallized into words. Sometimes the least distraction broke some kind of thread when he was in communication with the sea.… It may be added that no one was ever less pompous about his aspirations.
To-day Harry observed the sharpening of the pencils, and commented.
"So a masterpiece is signalled, Archie," he said.
Archie blew the lead-dust from his finger.
"Quite right, old boy," he said. "Lord! I'm full of great thoughts. Do go to bed, and then I'll begin."
Jessie joined in.
"Archie, do let me hold your pencils for you," she said, "like Dora in David Copperfield. I shall feel as if I was doing something."
Archie laughed.
