a glimpse of certain pages he hadn't looked at for months, and that
accident, in turn, to his being struck with the high promise they
revealed--a rare result of such retrospections, which it was his habit to
avoid as much as possible: they usually brought home to him that the glow
of composition might be a purely subjective and misleading emotion. On
this occasion a certain belief in himself disengaged itself whimsically
from the serried erasures of his first draft, making him think it best
after all to pursue his present trial to the end. If he could write as
well under the rigour of privation it might be a mistake to change the
conditions before that spell had spent itself. He would go back to
London of course, but he would go back only when he should have finished
his book. This was the vow he privately made, restoring his manuscript
to the table-drawer. It may be added that it took him a long time to
finish his book, for the subject was as difficult as it was fine, and he
was literally embarrassed by the fulness of his notes. Something within
him warned him that he must make it supremely good--otherwise he should
lack, as regards his private behaviour, a handsome excuse. He had a
horror of this deficiency and found himself as firm as need be on the
question of the lamp and the file. He crossed the Alps at last and spent
the winter, the spring, the ensuing summer, in Italy, where still, at the
end of a twelvemonth, his task was unachieved. "Stick to it--see it
through": this general injunction of St. George's was good also for the
particular case. He applied it to the utmost, with the result that when
in its slow order the summer had come round again he felt he had given
all that was in him. This time he put his papers into his portmanteau,
with the address of his publisher attached, and took his way northward.

He had been absent from London for two years--two years which, seeming to
count as more, had made such a difference in his own life--through the
production of a novel far stronger, he believed, than "Ginistrella"--that