"I shall write--of course I shall write some day," he said, turning back
to his seat. "I've had a novel in the back of my head for years; and
now's the time to pull it out."
He hardly knew what he was saying; but before the end of the sentence he
saw that Clare had understood what he meant to convey, and henceforth he
felt committed to letting her talk to him as much as she pleased about
his book. He himself, in consequence, took to thinking about it more
consecutively; and just as his friends ceased to urge him to write, he
sat down in earnest to begin.
The vision that had come to him had no likeness to any of his earlier
imaginings. Two or three subjects had haunted him, pleading for
expression, during the first years of his marriage; but these now seemed
either too lyrical or too tragic. He no longer saw life on the heroic
scale: he wanted to do something in which men should look no bigger than
the insects they were. He contrived in the course of time to reduce one
of his old subjects to these dimensions, and after nights of brooding he
made a dash at it, and wrote an opening chapter that struck him as
not too bad. In the exhilaration of this first attempt he spent some
pleasant evenings revising and polishing his work; and gradually a
feeling of authority and importance developed in him. In the morning,
when he woke, instead of his habitual sense of lassitude, he felt an
eagerness to be up and doing, and a conviction that his individual task
was a necessary part of the world's machinery.
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