‘About four hundred and fifty lines,’ answered Lucian.
‘Say another twenty-four pages,’ said Robertson. ‘Well, it runs now to three hundred and fifty—that means that it’s going to be a book of close upon four hundred pages.’
‘Well?’ questioned Lucian.
‘I was merely thinking that it is a long time since the public was asked to buy a volume containing four hundred pages of blank verse,’ remarked the publisher. ‘I hope this won’t frighten anybody.’
‘You make some very extraordinary remarks,’ said Lucian, with unmistakable signs of annoyance. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, nothing, nothing!’ answered Robertson, who was on sufficient terms of intimacy with Lucian to be able to chaff him a little. ‘I was merely thinking of trade considerations.’
‘You appear to be always “merely thinking” of something extraordinary,’ said Lucian. ‘What can trade considerations have to do with the length of my poem?’
‘What indeed?’ said the publisher, and began to talk of something else. But when Lucian had gone he looked rather doubtfully at the pile of interlineated proof, and glanced from it to the thin octavo with which the new poet had won all hearts nearly five years before. ‘I wish it had been just a handful of gold like that!’ he said to himself. ‘Four hundred pages of blank verse all at one go!—it’s asking a good deal, unless it catches on with the old maids and the dowagers, like the Course of Time and the Epic of Hades. Well, we shall see; but I’d rather have some of your earlier lyrics than this weighty performance, Lucian, my boy—I would indeed!’
Lucian finished his epic before the middle of July, and fell to work on the final stages of his tragedy. He had promised to read it to the Athenæum company on the first day of the coming October, and there was still much to do in shaping and revising it. He began to feel impatient and irritable; the sight of his desk annoyed him, and he took to running out of town into the country whenever the wish for the shade of woods and the peacefulness of the lanes came upon him. Before the end of the month he felt unable to work, and he repaired to Sprats for counsel and comfort.
‘I don’t know how or why it is,’ he said, telling her his troubles, ‘but I don’t feel as if I had a bit of work left in me. I haven’t any power of concentration left—I’m always wanting to be doing something else. And yet I haven’t worked very hard this year, and we have been away a great deal. It’s nearly time for going away again, too—I believe Haidee has already made some arrangement.’