“Is it all bad?” she asked.  “Or just the new part.”

“The whole thing,” he grunted.

“That’s that Belgian thing, isn’t it?”

“That’s the one.”

“Well,” she pointed out to him, “you thought that was good once.  If it all looks alike to you this morning, perhaps what you’ve just been writing is as good as that, and it’s just your mood to-day that makes it look rotten.”

He closed the score and slapped his hand down upon it with a gesture of dismissal.  Then he rose and leaned back against the edge of the table.  “That’s good logic, my dear,” he conceded, “but it doesn’t cover the ground.  The old stuff was good in a way.  I really meant it and felt it and I managed to get it down on paper.  And the new stuff is like it, in that it’s a damned clever imitation of it.  I had to do it that way because I couldn’t get back into the old mood.  I’m sick of atrocities and horrors—­everything that’s got the name of war in it, even though I was never under fire myself.  Well, writing the imitation has made me hate the thing I was trying to imitate.  I stuck at it for the reason I told you this morning.  But, good God, when it results in stuff like this...!  Jennie, what shall I do about it?  Shall I take this thing now and chuck it into the stove and then tell La Chaise and Mrs. Wollaston to go to the devil?  Or shall I tuck it under my arm like a good little boy and see if I can get away with it?”

She looked at him thoughtfully.  “What is the new thing you want to write?” she asked.

He smiled.  “You’re a wonder, Jennie,” he said.  “There is a new thing.  I’m simply swamped in it.  It won’t let me alone.  It’s been driving me pretty nearly crazy.  That’s why it’s been such perfect hell sticking to this other thing.  Jennie, it’s another opera.  A big one, full size.  A romantic fairy opera.  I haven’t got it in order yet.  It isn’t fit to talk about.  But it’s about a princess, a little blue-eyed, pale-haired princess, who is under a spell.  She’s dumb.  She’s dumb except in the presence of her true lover.  Do you see?  They are trying to cure her and they can’t.  But mysteriously in the night they hear her singing.  Her lover is with her, and they try to solve the mystery.  Maybe they kill him, I don’t know.  Or maybe they make him faithless to her.  I don’t know whether there is a fairy story like that or whether I just made it up.  And I haven’t worked it out at all.  I haven’t any words for it, no book, nor anything.  But I tell you it comes in waves, whole scenes from it.  I’d like a hundred hands to write it down with.  I’d like to take one header into it and never come up.  And meanwhile I’m slugging away at that other damned thing because Mrs. Wollaston and LaChaise want it,—­because it’s the main chance.”

She asked why he didn’t tell them about the new idea and get them to adopt it instead, but he greeted this suggestion with an impatient laugh.

“It would be absolutely impossible for Ravinia in the first place,” he said.  “The thing would need as big a production as, oh, Pelleas and Melisande.  And then this woman could never sing it.  She isn’t the type.  This is different altogether from anything she could do.  Oh, no, it’s quite hopeless until after I’ve succeeded with something else.  But, oh, my God, Jennie, if you could hear it!”