His imagination glowed and
melted down material, his intentions multiplied and made the air a
golden haze. He saw not only the thing he should do, but the next
and the next and the next; the future opened before him and he seemed
to walk on marble slabs. The more he tried the dramatic form the
more he loved it, the more he looked at it the more he perceived in
it. What he perceived in it indeed he now perceived everywhere; if
he stopped, in the London dusk, before some flaring shop-window, the
place immediately constituted itself behind footlights, became a
framed stage for his figures. He hammered at these figures in his
lonely lodging, he shaped them and he shaped their tabernacle; he was
like a goldsmith chiselling a casket, bent over with the passion for
perfection. When he was neither roaming the streets with his vision
nor worrying his problem at his table, he was exchanging ideas on the
general question with Mrs. Alsager, to whom he promised details that
would amuse her in later and still happier hours.
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