“Livy,” he said, “it would pain me to think that when I swear it sounds like that.  You got the words right, Livy, but you don’t know the tune.”

Yet he never willingly gave her pain, and he adored her and gloried in her dominion, his life long.  Howells speaks of his beautiful and tender loyalty to her as the “most moving quality of his most faithful soul.”

It was a greater part of him than the love of most men for their wives, and she merited all the worship he could give her, all the devotion, all the implicit obedience, by her surpassing force and beauty of character.

She guarded his work sacredly; and reviewing the manuscripts which he was induced to discard, and certain edited manuscripts, one gets a partial idea of what the reading world owes to Olivia Clemens.  Of the discarded. manuscripts (he seems seldom to have destroyed them) there are a multitude, and among them all scarcely one that is not a proof of her sanity and high regard for his literary honor.  They are amusing—­some of them; they are interesting—­some of them; they are strong and virile —­some of them; but they are unworthy—­most of them, though a number remain unfinished because theme or interest failed.

Mark Twain was likely to write not wisely but too much, piling up hundreds of manuscript pages only because his brain was thronging as with a myriad of fireflies, a swarm of darting, flashing ideas demanding release.  As often as not he began writing with only a nebulous idea of what he proposed to do.  He would start with a few characters and situations, trusting in Providence to supply material as needed.  So he was likely to run ashore any time.  As for those other attempts—­stories “unavailable” for one reason or another—­he was just as apt to begin those as the better sort, for somehow he could never tell the difference.  That is one of the hall-marks of genius—­the thing which sharply differentiates genius from talent.  Genius is likely to rate a literary disaster as its best work.  Talent rarely makes that mistake.

Among the abandoned literary undertakings of these early years of authorship there is the beginning of what was doubtless intended to become a book, “The Second Advent,” a story which opens with a very doubtful miraculous conception in Arkansas, and leads only to grotesquery and literary disorder.  There is another, “The Autobiography of a Damn Fool,” a burlesque on family history, hopelessly impossible; yet he began it with vast enthusiasm and, until he allowed her to see the manuscript, thought it especially good.  “Livy wouldn’t have it,” he said, “so I gave it up.”  There is another, “The Mysterious Chamber,” strong and fine in conception, vividly and intensely interesting; the story of a young lover who is accidentally locked behind a secret door in an old castle and cannot announce himself.  He wanders at last down into subterranean passages beneath the castle, and he lives in this isolation