He lost himself a moment, examining the sheets of his new book, while the
younger man's eyes wandered over the room again.

"Lord, what good things I should do if I had such a charming place as
this to do them in!" Paul reflected. The outer world, the world of
accident and ugliness, was so successfully excluded, and within the rich
protecting square, beneath the patronising sky, the dream-figures, the
summoned company, could hold their particular revel. It was a fond
prevision of Overt's rather than an observation on actual data, for which
occasions had been too few, that the Master thus more closely viewed
would have the quality, the charming gift, of flashing out, all
surprisingly, in personal intercourse and at moments of suspended or
perhaps even of diminished expectation. A happy relation with him would
be a thing proceeding by jumps, not by traceable stages.

"Do you read them--really?" he asked, laying down the proofs on Paul's
enquiring of him how soon the work would be published. And when the
young man answered "Oh yes, always," he was moved to mirth again by
something he caught in his manner of saying that. "You go to see your
grandmother on her birthday--and very proper it is, especially as she
won't last for ever. She has lost every faculty and every sense; she
neither sees, nor hears, nor speaks; but all customary pieties and kindly
habits are respectable. Only you're strong if you _do_ read 'em! _I_
couldn't, my dear fellow. You are strong, I know; and that's just a part
of what I wanted to say to you. You're very strong indeed. I've been
going into your other things--they've interested me immensely. Some one
ought to have told me about them before--some one I could believe. But
whom can one believe? You're wonderfully on the right road--it's awfully
decent work. Now do you mean to keep it up?--that's what I want to ask
you."