doubtless people to whom torments of such an order appear hardly
more natural than the contortions of disease; but I don't after all
know why I should in this connexion so much as mention them. For
the few persons, at any rate, abnormal or not, with whom my
anecdote is concerned, literature was a game of skill, and skill
meant courage, and courage meant honour, and honour meant passion,
meant life. The stake on the table was of a special substance and
our roulette the revolving mind, but we sat round the green board
as intently as the grim gamblers at Monte Carlo. Gwendolen Erme,
for that matter, with her white face and her fixed eyes, was of the
very type of the lean ladies one had met in the temples of chance.
I recognised in Corvick's absence that she made this analogy vivid.
It was extravagant, I admit, the way she lived for the art of the
pen. Her passion visibly preyed on her, and in her presence I felt
almost tepid. I got hold of "Deep Down" again: it was a desert in
which she had lost herself, but in which too she had dug a
wonderful hole in the sand--a cavity out of which Corvick had still
more remarkably pulled her.

Early in March I had a telegram from her, in consequence of which I
repaired immediately to Chelsea, where the first thing she said to
me was: "He has got it, he has got it!"

She was moved, as I could see, to such depths that she must mean
the great thing. "Vereker's idea?"

"His general intention. George has cabled from Bombay."

She had the missive open there; it was emphatic though concise.
"Eureka. Immense." That was all--he had saved the cost of the