They worked rapidly and well together. Jean dictated and Herrick typed. When it was done he read it aloud.
"That's great stuff. I'll see that Thompson stands me a drink for finding him such a prodigy."
"But it isn't all mine. I could never have done it alone. I should probably have blurbed all over the place but for your restraining influence, or become disgusted and given it up."
"You see, it's not easy to do things alone, even when we're very full of them and want to very much. Is it?"
He looked up suddenly and Jean saw the loneliness that she had glimpsed so often below Herrick's moods. The loneliness of the small boy in the bare fields and of the grown man with The Bunch.
"No—I don't suppose it is."
There was a long silence and then Herrick said, as if they had often spoken of it before:
"Do you know, sometimes I have felt that you think I am weak or that I don't want to do the novel very much, and it hurts to have you think that. I suppose if I were a genius, or had the will of I don't know what, I would sit up here and write and write and write. But I'm not made that way. To go week after week, month after month, alone, believing in yourself, fighting through those horrible moods of depression when all your work seems piffling and insincere, beginning again—ugh." Herrick shivered as if his own words had opened a window through which blew a cold blast of memory. "I don't doubt there are people who could. But I can't."
"I don't think I ever thought you were weak, or that you didn't want to do it, but I have wished often that you would."
Jean forced her eyes to meet Herrick's. She felt that she owed him something and that words were not enough. The color ran under her smooth skin and her eyes were shy. Herrick came nearer but he did not touch her. The lines of his face were clean and sharply chiseled and his eyes burned. He spoke simply, making no personal demand, even for sympathy.