“But if they are true?”

“Still let us avoid them,” said he; and at that she was most distressed.

“It is so like what you used to say when you were a boy!” she cried.

“You are so anxious to have me grow up,” he replied, with proper dolefulness.  “If you like the book, Grizel, you must have patience with the kind of thing that produced it.  That night in the Den, when I won your scorn, I was in the preliminary stages of composition.  At such times an author should be locked up; but I had got out, you see.  I was so enamoured of my little fancies that I forgot I was with you.  No wonder you were angry.”

“I was not angry with you for forgetting me,” she said sharply. (There was no catching Grizel, however artful you were.) “But you were sighing to yourself, you were looking as tragic as if some dreadful calamity had occurred—­”

“The idea that had suddenly come to me was a touching one,” he said.

“But you looked triumphant, too.”

“That was because I saw I could make something of it.”  “Why did you walk as if you were lame?”

“The man I was thinking of,” Tommy explained, “had broken his leg.  I don’t mind telling you that it was Corp.”

He ought to have minded telling her, for it could only add to her indignation; but he was too conceited to give weight to that.

“Corp’s leg was not broken,” said practical Grizel.

“I broke it for him,” replied Tommy; and when he had explained, her eyes accused him of heartlessness.

“If it had been my own,” he said, in self-defence, “it should have gone crack just the same.”

“Poor Gavinia!  Had you no feeling for her?”

“Gavinia was not there,” Tommy replied triumphantly.  “She had run off with a soldier.”

“You dared to conceive that?”

“It helped.”

Grizel stamped her foot.  “You could take away dear Gavinia’s character with a smile!”

“On the contrary,” said Tommy, “my heart bled for her.  Did you not notice that I was crying?” But he could not make Grizel smile; so, to please her, he said, with a smile that was not very sincere:  “I wish I were different, but that is how ideas come to me—­at least, all those that are of any value.”

“Surely you could fight against them and drive them away?”

This to Tommy, who held out sugar to them to lure them to him!  But still he treated her with consideration.

“That would mean my giving up writing altogether, Grizel,” he said kindly.

“Then why not give it up?”

Really!  But she admired him, and still he bore with her.

“I don’t like the book,” she said, “if it is written at such a cost.”

“People say the book has done them good, Grizel.”

“What does that matter, if it does you harm?” In her eagerness to persuade him, her words came pell-mell.  “If writing makes you live in such an unreal world, it must do you harm.  I see now what Mr. Cathro meant, long ago, when he called you Senti——­”