"Have you got any? Won't you read them to me?"
"You can look at them if you like," said Lionel, blushing under his tan. Like most Englishmen, he was a little ashamed of having any intelligence at all. He pulled out a little penny account-book from the drawer under the bookshelf. "They're pretty bad, I expect."
Roger looked at them.
"They're not bad at all," he said. "You've got something to say. You haven't got much ear; but that's only a matter of training. People can always write well if they are moved or interested. Great writing happens when a carefully trained technician undergoes a deep emotion, or, still better, has survived one. Have you written prose at all?"
"No. Prose is much more difficult. I never know when to stop."
"Nor do I. Prose becomes hard directly one begins to make it an art instead of a second nature."
He wanted to talk with Lionel about Portobe. He was in that mood in which the wound of a grief aches to be stricken. He wanted to know what Lionel had said to Ottalie, and what she had said to him. He had that feeling which sometimes comes to one in London. "Here you are, in London, before me. And you have been in such a place and such a place, where I myself have been, and you have talked with people known to me. How wonderful life is!" To his delight, Lionel began to talk about Ireland unprompted.
"I wish I could write prose like yours," he said. "It was your prose first made me want to write. I was stopping with the Fawcetts at Portobe. It was the year before Leslie married, just before I went to India, to do Delhi-sore. Ottalie had just got that book you wrote about the Dall. You'd sent it to her. That was a fine book. I liked your little word-pictures."
"I am sorry you liked that book. It is very crude. I remember Ottalie was down on me for it."
"Ottalie was a fine person," said Lionel. "She had such a delicate, quick mind. And then. I don't know. One can't describe a woman. A man does things and defines himself by doing them, but a woman just is. Ottalie just was; but I don't know what she was. I think she was about the finest thing I've ever seen."