But the having his own study and separate establishment did not raise the masterpiece out of the deeps—nor did the world thrill at his originality so readily as he had hoped. He did much chewing of the quill.
Being young, he wrote for art’s sake; and it was the beginning of several affectations in which he half believed.
His solitary hours of work, and of brooding upon work, were fretted with other and more overwhelming dreams. The rustle of women’s petticoats began to trouble him as he wrote. In the faces that passed him in the street he saw beckoning eyes under many a pretty bonnet. And the writing, dragging already for want of life and substance, now further dragged, interrupted by the frills and figures of women.
All nature’s urging of the adolescent to part from the parent brood was calling upon him to pair; and the mystic fascination of the fragrance of women was enhanced by the restlessness of dawning manhood that vexes the lustiness of youth with the blatant trumpet-call to action, the fret to be up and about and doing.
The dainty place that Betty had held by his side was empty. And the gentle companionship of the girl that had filled the lad’s life gave way to a vague hunger for affection.
To him in his grey loneliness came, as fairy to brooding Cinderella, lighting the sordid gloom of his toil, fitful flashes of the girl’s face in his day-dreams. Betty still held vague possession of his affections. But youth is not content to clutch at thin air.
Noll cudgelled his wits at the desk of his lonely room, in vain.
The masterpiece would not come.
Then the youth decided that he was making a mistake—he was keeping himself too much to himself. He would go deep into the literary world. He was convinced that a literary man can do nothing unless he be in the Literary Swim.
A letter from Horace was his confirmation. Horace was fascinated by the student-life of Paris—its free-handed comradeship, its gaiety, its good-fellowship in all things, its frank acceptance of nature, its rebellion against the rigid conventions, its freedom from cant, its glory in the joy of life. He had decided to give up his life of wealth at home for a few years, to be a poor student in Paris for awhile, to put aside the boredoms of the pampered rich, and, like the strenuous man, to live life largely.