might be growing overhead. At first he destroyed the fruit of his
stolen hour, and even after he took to carrying it about fondly in his
pocket, and to rewriting it in a splendid new form that had come to
him just as he was stepping into bed, he continued to conceal it from
his overseer's eyes. And still he thought all was over with him when
Pym said the story did not march.

"It is a dead thing," Pym would roar, flinging down the
manuscript,--"a dead thing because the stakes your man is playing for,
a woman's love, is less than a wooden counter to you. You are a fine
piece of mechanism, my solemn-faced don, but you are a watch that
won't go because you are not wound up. Nobody can wind the artist up
except a chit of a girl; and how you are ever to get one to take pity
on you, only the gods who look after men with a want can tell.

"It becomes more impenetrable every day," he said. "No use your
sitting there tearing yourself to bits. Out into the street with you!
I suspend these sittings until you can tell me you have kissed a
girl."

He was still saying this sort of thing when the famous "Letters" were
published--T. Sandys, author. "Letters to a Young Man About to be
Married" was the full title, and another almost as applicable would
have been "Bits Cut Out of a Story because They Prevented its
Marching." If you have any memory you do not need to be told how that
splendid study, so ennobling, so penetrating, of woman at her best,
took the town. Tommy woke a famous man, and, except Elspeth, no one
was more pleased than big-hearted, hopeless, bleary Pym.

"But how the ---- has it all come about!" he kept roaring.