with its manifestation in her admirable care for his material well-being, Adrian, just at this Eastertide, began to strike me as a man lacking some essential of happiness.  They spent a week or so with us at Northlands.  Adrian confessed dog-weariness.  His looks confirmed his words.  A vertical furrow between the brows and a little dragging line at each corner of the mouth below the fair moustache forbade the familiar mockery in his pleasant face.  In moments of repose the cross of strain, almost suggestive of a squint, appeared in his blue eyes.  He was no longer debonair, no longer the lightly laughing philosopher, the preacher of paradox seeing flippancy in the Money Article and sorrowful wisdom in Little Tich.  He was morose and irritable.  He had acquired a nervous habit of secretly rubbing his thumbs swiftly over his finger-tips when Doria, in her pride, spoke of his work, which amounted almost to ill-breeding.  It was only late at night during our last smoke that he assumed a semblance of the old Adrian; and by that time he had consumed as much champagne and brandy as would have rendered jocose the prophet Jeremiah.

He was suffering, poor fellow, from a nervous breakdown.  From Doria we learned the cause.  For the last three months he had been working at insane pressure.  At seven he rose; at a quarter to eight he breakfasted; at half past he betook himself to his ascetic workroom and remained there till half-past one.  At four o’clock he began a three-hour spell of work.  At night a four hours’ spell—­from nine to one, if they had no evening engagement, from midnight to four o’clock in the morning if they had been out.

“But, my darling child!” cried Barbara, aghast when she heard of this maniacal time-table, “you must put your foot down.  You mustn’t let him do it.  He is killing himself.”

“No man,” said I, in warm support of my wife, “can go on putting out creative work for more than four hours a day.  Quite famous novelists whom I meet at the Athenaeum have told me so themselves.  Even prodigious people like Sir Walter Scott and Zola—­”

“Yes, yes,” said Doria.  “But they were not Adrian.  Every artist must be a law to himself.  Adrian’s different.  Why—­those two that you’ve mentioned—­they slung out stuff by the bucketful.  It didn’t matter to them what they wrote.  But Adrian has to get the rhythm and the balance and the beauty of every sentence he writes—­to say nothing of the subtlety of his analysis and the perfect drawing of his pictures.  My dear, good people”—­she threw out her hands in an impatient gesture—­“you don’t know what you’re talking about.  How can you?  It’s impossible for you to conceive—­it’s almost impossible even for me to conceive—­the creative workings of the mind of a man of genius.  Four hours a day!  Your mechanical fiction-monger, yes.  Four hours a day is stamped all over the slack drivel they publish.  But you can’t imagine that work like Adrian’s is to be done in this dead mechanical way.”