“In the man or his story?”

“In either,” he answered.  “As a story-writer I am altogether unproven.  My novel may prove an utter failure.”

She shook her head.

“You are not of the race of men who fail, my dear Douglas,” she said.  “I think that that is why I like you.’,

“I have been as near failure as any man can go,” he said.

“It is over,” she answered.  “Now tell me of your story.”

He told her its outline.  She listened with slowly nodding head, grasping every point quickly, electrically, sympathetically.  His slight awkwardness in speaking of his own work passed away.  He expatiated, was coherent and convincing.  More than once she interrupted him.  Her insight was almost miraculous.  She penetrated with perfect ease beneath his words, analysed his motives with him, showed him a psychological weakness in the workings of one of his characters.  She was liberal with her praise, called his characters by their christian names as though they were old friends, suggested other moves across the chessboard of his plot, until he felt that he and she, and those dear puppets of his own creations, were denizens together of some fairy and ethereal world, wandering through the fascinating maze of imaginative life.  It was almost an intoxication, this wonderfully stimulating contact with a mind so receptive, so brilliant, so sympathetic.  He forgot his garret, Cicely, the drear past, the passionate warnings of Drexley and Rice.  As a weaver of stories he was in his first youth.  He had peopled but few worlds with those wonderfully precious creations—­the children of the brain.  They were as dear to him as the offspring of his own flesh and blood could ever be.  Hitherto they had been the mysterious but delightful companions of his solitude.  There was a peculiar pleasure in finding that another, too, could realise them.  They seemed indeed to pass, as they two sat there and talked of them, into an actual and material existence, to have taken to themselves bodily shapes, the dear servants of his will, delightful puppets of his own creation.  The colour mounted into his cheeks, and the fire of hot life flashed through his pulses.  He drank wine again, conscious only of a subtle and quickening happiness, a delicious sense of full and musical life.

“You have given me a wonderful idea of your story,” she murmured.  “Nothing has charmed me so much for a long while.  Now the only thing which I am curious about is the style.”

“The style,” he repeated.  “I don’t think I have ever thought of that.”

“And yet,” she said, “you must have modified your usual style.  Your journalistic work, I think, is wonderful—­strong, full of life and colour, lurid, biting, rivetting.  Yet I doubt whether one could write a novel like that.”

“You can scarcely expect a hack journalist,” he said, with a smile, “to write with the elegance of a Walter Pater.  Yet of course I have taken pains—­and there is a good deal of revision to be done.”