CHAPTER II

THE STORY-BOOK WEST


When a man is twenty-one, and has had no experience, and graduates from
a small college where he roomed alone in splendour, and possesses a
gift of words and a certain delight in reading, and is thrown into new
and, to him, romantic surroundings--when all these stars of chance
cross their orbits, he begins to write a novel. The novel never has
anything to do with the aforesaid new and romantic surroundings;
neither has it the faintest connection with anything the author has
ever seen. That would limit his imagination.

Once he was well settled in his new home, and the first excitement of
novel impressions had worn off, Bennington de Laney began to write
regularly three hours a day. He did his scribbling with a fountain pen,
on typewriter paper, and left a broad right-hand margin, just as he had
seen Brooks do. In it he experienced, above all, a delightful feeling
of power. He enjoyed to the full his ability to swing gorgeous involved
sentences, phrase after phrase, down the long arc of rhetoric, without
a pause, without a quiver, until they rushed unhasting up the other
slope to end in beautiful words, polysyllabic, but with just the right
number of syllables. Interspersed were short sentences. He counted the
words in one or the other of these two sorts, carefully noting the
relations they bore to each other. On occasions he despaired because