WHEN PIPPA PASSED
—they'll like him there, or I'm much mistaken."
In a month it seemed that they had always known him. Intimacy was so impossible with his intured, elusive nature, that to have him sitting through hours of silence by the birch fire, abstracted, dreamy, inattentive, except to some chance word that stirred his fancy, was to know him well, to all intents. His nerves, dulled to all great torments like poverty, hunger, obscurity, quivered like violin strings under little unaccustomed jarrings. If interrupted in the reading of his verses he would lose his control beyond belief; a chance cough, the falling of an ember, put him out of tune for hours. He possessed little sense of humour, and the lightest satire turned him sulky. A child might have teased him to madness; it was evident to them that his utterly lonely life had preserved him from constant torture at the hands of associates.
Until the book was complete he refused to have the great publisher brought to hear it read. Sometimes for days they would not see him, then on
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