“Then you’ve read it.”
“I haven’t read it. I’ve only sniffed the first page.”
“That’s enough. Glance at the conclusion. Get your statement, three points; that’ll run you through a thousand words. Look here—shall I write it for you?”
“I’ve got fifty ideas,” she said beginning to write.
“That’s too many, Miriam. That’s the trouble with you. You’ve got too many ideas. You’re messing up your mind, quite a good mind, with too swift a succession of ideas.” She wrote busily on, drinking in his elaboration of his view of the state of her mind. “H’m,” he concluded, stopping suddenly; but she read in the sound no intention of breaking away because she had nothing to say to him. He was watching, in some way interested. He sat back in his chair; sympathetically withheld. Actually deferring to her work....
She tore off the finished page and transfixed it on the grass with a hatpin. Her pencil flew. The statement was finished and leading to another. Perhaps he was right about three ideas. A good shape. The last must come from the book. She would have to consult it. No. It should be left till later. Her second page joined the first. It was incredible that he should be sitting there inactive, obliterated by her work.
She tore off the third sheet and dropped her pencil on the grass.
“Finished? Three sheets in less than twenty minutes. How do you do it, Miriam?”
“It’ll do. But I shall have to copy it. I’ve resisted the temptation to say what I think about the House of Curmudgeons. Trace it back to the First Curmudgeon. Yet it seems somehow wrong to write in the air, so currently. The first time I did a review, of a bad little book on Whitman, I spent a fortnight of evenings reading.”
“You began at the Creation. Said everything you had to say about the history of mankind.”