But everything was changed now.  The masterpiece was a jealous god.  Jealous and, I sometimes thought, apt to be a little tiresome.  It had to be referred to so very deferentially, with such carefully serious respect.  Also, it cast a shadow of gravity over Delancey—­Delancey who was never meant to be a high priest, but rather a young man in white flannels, with a cigarette in his mouth, punting a young girl with a red sunshade—­like an illustration to one of his own stories.

Friendship is a difficult, dangerous job.  It is also (though we rarely admit it) extremely exhausting.  But never have my patience and endurance been more severely tested than during the year of Delancey’s masterpiece.  He finally decided that in the foreground, there was to be the clash of two human souls and in the background, the collision of two worlds—­the old (pre-War) and the new.  In fact, a partie carree of conflicts.

“You with your love of form,” he explained to me, “will appreciate the care I have given to the structure.  It is,” he added, “difficult to mould vast masses of material.”

As the months went by I began to be horribly afraid that Delancey’s novel would be very, very long indeed.  And even if nobody read it through, not even a reviewer, I should have to without skipping a word or a comma.

“The sentences,” Delancey told me, “are rather long.  I find the semicolon very useful for cumulative effects.”  A vast array of words policed by semi-colons.  I felt a little dizzy.  Would they be able to keep order?

“Of course,” he continued, “the interest is very largely psychological, but I regard the book mainly as a document—­a social document.  The fiction of to-day is the history of to-morrow.”

This seemed conclusive.  The book could not have less than 700 pages.  A social document with psychological interest and a double conflict.  Why, it would be short at that.  And then, one day, when Delancey’s book had become to me a form of eternity, he arrived, breathless with excitement.

“To all intents and purposes, it’s finished,” he gasped.

“Thank God,” I murmured faintly.

“It will be an awful loss to me,” he stated mournfully.

“It isn’t dead yet,” I said with feeble jocularity.

“It is sad to see your children leave you.  To watch them step out into a cold, inhospitable world,” he went on.

“A warm, welcoming world,” I amended dishonestly.  “You haven’t told me what it is called yet.”

“It isn’t called anything.  I want you to be its god-mother, Charlotte.  What about ’Whither’?”

“Too like a pamphlet,” I was glad to be on firm ground again.

“I thought about ‘Fate’s Laboratory,’ but it isn’t very rhythmical, is it?”

“Not very,” I agreed.

“The question mark after the ‘Whither’ would look nice on the cover,” he reflected regretfully.