“Is that the forthcoming history?” he asked.  “You are not one of the authors who perform the process of correction mentally—­you revise and improve with the pen in your hand.”

Romayne looked at him in surprise.  “I suspect, Mr. Winterfield, you have used your pen for other purposes than writing letters.”

“No, indeed; you pay me an undeserved compliment.  When you come to see me in Devonshire, I can show you some manuscripts, and corrected proofs, left by our great writers, collected by my father.  My knowledge of the secrets of the craft has been gained by examining those literary treasures.  If the public only knew that every writer worthy of the name is the severest critic of his own book before it ever gets into the hands of the reviewers, how surprised they would be!  The man who has worked in the full fervor of composition yesterday is the same man who sits in severe and merciless judgment to-day on what he has himself produced.  What a fascination there must be in the Art which exacts and receives such double labor as this?”

Romayne thought—­not unkindly—­of his wife.  Stella had once asked him how long a time he was usually occupied in writing one page.  The reply had filled her with pity and wonder.  “Why do you take all that trouble?” she had gently remonstrated.  “It would be just the same to the people, darling, if you did it in half the time.”

By way of changing the topic, Romayne led his visitor into another room.  “I have a picture here,” he said, “which belongs to a newer school of painting.  You have been talking of hard work in one Art; there it is in another.”

“Yes,” said Winterfield, “there it is—­the misdirected hard work, which has been guided by no critical faculty, and which doesn’t know where to stop.  I try to admire it; and I end in pitying the poor artist.  Look at that leafless felled tree in the middle distance.  Every little twig, on the smallest branch, is conscientiously painted—­and the result is like a colored photograph.  You don’t look at a landscape as a series of separate parts; you don’t discover every twig on a tree; you see the whole in Nature, and you want to see the whole in a picture.  That canvas presents a triumph of patience and pains, produced exactly as a piece of embroidery is produced, all in little separate bits, worked with the same mechanically complete care.  I turn away from it to your shrubbery there, with an ungrateful sense of relief.”

He walked to the window as he spoke.  It looked out on the grounds in front of the house.  At the same moment the noise of rolling wheels became audible on the drive.  An open carriage appeared at the turn in the road.  Winterfield called Romayne to the window.  “A visitor,” he began—­and suddenly drew back, without saying a word more.

Romayne looked out, and recognized his wife.

“Excuse me for one moment,” he said, “it is Mrs. Romayne.”

On that morning an improvement in the fluctuating state of Mrs. Eyrecourt’s health had given Stella another of those opportunities of passing an hour or two with her husband, which she so highly prized.  Romayne withdrew, to meet her at the door—­too hurriedly to notice Winterfield standing, in the corner to which he had retreated, like a man petrified.