Then she opened the desk, and after a final glance at her closed door, took from about her neck, beneath the collar of her brown silk blouse, a tiny key upon a fragile gold chain of links as slim as thin wire. With the key she unlocked a drawer inside the desk, and as she did this her expression altered;—the guarded look vanished, and there came in its place a tenderness, wistful and yet so keen that the colour in her cheeks heightened and her softened eyes grew lustrous.
She took first from the drawer a little notebook bound in black leather, and opened it. All the pages were blank except the first one, upon which she had lately written the opening sentence of a novel that she intended to offer the world when the work had been secretly completed. She read the sentence over fondly and yet with some perplexity. It was this:
Gregory Harlford had just fallen out of his airplane at a height of 7000 feet and as he possessed no parachute he realized that only a miracle could save him from being dashed to pieces at the end of his descent.
That was the original form of the sentence, but Cornelia had made an alteration. She had scratched out “7000” and replaced it with “5000.” To-day she looked at the latter figure thoughtfully for some time, and, having drawn a line through it, wrote “1000” above it. Then, for a few moments, she had an encouraged look and seemed about to begin a second sentence, but did not do so. Instead, she rested her elbow upon the desk and her chin upon her hand; and as she continued her study of the opening of her novel, her air of being encouraged gave way to a renewed bafflement. It was not that the opening sentence displeased her;—on the contrary. Yet whenever she wished to add another and get on with the story, she came to one of those inexplicable blank gaps in the creative mind, one of those flat stops that so often set even the most willing novelists to walking the floor or the links.
She was sure that if she could once surmount the difficulty of the second sentence, the rest would flow easily from her. Gregory Harlford was to be the hero of her story, and she had in her mind’s eye a remarkably definite portrait of him, which she wished to include in the novel; but she felt that under the circumstances a description of his person and attributes would be out of place in the second sentence. There was a vague but persistent impediment somewhere;—inspiration failed to make an appearance, and, after waiting almost fifteen minutes for it, she sighed, pushed the little book away and turned to the other contents of the drawer.
There were several queer items: the stub of an almost entirely consumed lead pencil; an odd bit of broken amber, not quite cylindrical, and half of an old shoe-lace. There were also a dozen dried violets, a flattened rosebud, and a packet of small sheets of note paper whereon appeared cryptic designs—line drawings most curious. These enigmas were what now occupied Cornelia.
They were her own handiwork; nobody had even seen any of them, and they were of different ages. The oldest of the designs had been drawn long, long ago;—that is to say, long, long ago, according to Cornelia’s sense of the passage of time. For she was sixteen now, and she had made the first of the queer drawings four eternal years earlier, when she was only a child.
It appeared to be the representation in profile of a steep stairway, or perhaps a series of superimposed cliffs, each with a small shelf at its base. Beginning at the bottom of the sheet of paper, this stairway, or series of cliffs, rose to a small plateau or summit near the top; and upon each step, or shelf of cliff, there was drawn one of those little figures children call “men”;—the body is emaciated to the extent that it becomes a single straight line, the arms and legs being similar lines, and the head a round black dot.
In Cornelia’s drawing, each of these little figures was labelled, a name having been written beside it; and in some cases a descriptive word or two had been added beneath the name. Thus, under the name “Georgie P.”, which evidently belonged to the figure occupying the lowest step or shelf, there appeared in faded purple ink a phrase of qualified admiration, “Half Handsome.” Another expression of an enthusiasm limited by a defect in its subject seemed to refer to “Harold,” midway in the ascent—“Terribly Good Looking But Stingy.” However, the figure upon the summit, named in full, “William Peterson McAvoy,” was obviously the symbol of a being without flaw, for here Cornelia had carefully printed, all in capital letters: “ABSOLUTELY PERFECT.”