Channing's new caution, however, did not carry him to the length of giving up his daily visits to the Ruin. He needed the girl too much. His belonged to the class of creative brain that works only under the stimulus of emotion. Channing was fond of saying that he took his material red-hot out of life itself, and his novels represented a series of personal experiences, psychological and otherwise, which perhaps accounted for their marked success with a certain public.
Channing was not without genius. He had to a great degree the poet's sensitiveness to all things exquisite, and added to that he had a gift of facile expression. Subtleties of style, that effort to find exactly the right phrase and shade of meaning which is the stumbling-block of so many conscientious writers, troubled him not at all. Given the sensation, words in which to clothe it came instinctively, faster often than he could write them down. But first he must needs experience the sensation. This type of brain suffers from one disadvantage. In time the receptive surface of it becomes dulled, calloused, and as the confirmed drug-user requires constantly increasing or varying doses to produce effect, so such an imagination requires constantly increasing or varying doses of emotion.
These young Jacqueline Kildare was supplying in full measure. To his sophisticated palate she was as refreshing as cool spring water. She roused, among impulses more familiar to his experience, certain others with which he had not credited himself, impulses of tenderness, of protection, of chivalry. He began to be aware of a pleasure that was entirely new to him in the sight of Jacqueline with Mag's baby, their very frequent companion.
"I am getting primitive!" he thought. "This is going back to nature with a vengeance."
For the first time in his life, the thought of marriage came to him occasionally and was put away with some regret. "I must not lose my head," he admonished himself. "It will not last, of course. It never does."
Channing knew himself very thoroughly.
But if he must not offer marriage to the girl, he could at least help her to a career. It flattered his amour propre to realize that the object of his present affections, crude young thing as she was, might be called in a certain sense his equal, a fellow artist, one of the world's chosen. He spoke very often of her career, and Jacqueline listened, dreamily.
Of late she had somewhat lost interest in careers. Or rather, she had another sort of career in view; that of the lady in the tower, to whom her knight brings all his trophies. It seemed to her that this might be the happiest career of all.
She knew very well what she was doing for Channing. In the morning hours, and often after he left her far into the night, the author wrote steadily, with the ease and smoothness of creation that is one of the most satisfying pleasures known to human experience. Daily, when he came to her for refreshment, he brought manuscript to read, incidents, character sketches, whole chapters in the novel he had started. All of which filled Jacqueline with a new and heady sense of power. If she was not "writing a book," as Mag reported, she was at least helping to write one.
And she gave more to her lover than inspiration. He found her criticism unexpectedly valuable. There had been no lack of brains in her family, and the library at Storm was large and excellent. Philip Benoix and James Thorpe had both supplemented the girls' reading with great wisdom, so that Jacqueline's taste was formed upon far better literature than that of the average woman of his acquaintance. She was not easily shocked—Kate boasted that she had never put her girls' brains into petticoats—but now and then, despite Channing's growing care, unconscious product of his new chivalry, matter crept into his pages which made her shake her head in quick distaste.