"The life in town has only stimulated me, Mary," she confessed; "just stimulated me and excited my brain. I must work it off somehow. Let us begin at the novel to-morrow."
They began at the novel. Lady Agatha dictated it, and Mary took it down in short-hand. They worked out of doors. Mary had her seat under the boughs of a splendid chestnut tree on a little green lawn. The lawn was at the side of the house, not over-looked, enclosed on three sides by a splendid yew hedge. The dogs would lie at Mary's feet. There were Roy the St. Bernard, and Brian the bull-dog, a toy Pomeranian, and a little Chow. The dogs always stayed at Hazels. "If I took them up to town," Lady Agatha said, "they would see more of me, to be sure, but then they would always be losing me, for, of course, I couldn't take them out in town. And they always know I'll come back—they're so wise. The parting is dreadful, but they know I'll come back."
Mary sometimes wondered how her Ladyship had found time to think out her novel. For it seemed all ready and prepared in her mind. She would sweep up and down the grass while she dictated. Mary used to say that it meant a ten-mile walk of a morning. The train of her white morning-dress lopped the daisies in their places; the incessant passage of her feet made a track in the grass. Sometimes she would pass out of her secretary's hearing and have to be recalled by Mary's laughing voice of remonstrance.
"Am I afflicting you, Mary?" she asked on one of these occasions. "Am I overwhelming you? It's a horrible flood, isn't it?"
"You are very fluent," Mary answered, looking down at the queer little dots and spirals on her paper. "I daresay we'll have to prune it before it's printed. But it is a good fluency, a rich fluency. To me it is irresistible—like a spring freshet, like the sap rushing madly through all the veins of spring."
"Ah, you feel it?—you feel it like that, Mary? I feel it so myself; I riot in it."
"It will have no sense of effort—it is vital. I hope we shall be able to keep it up."
"Why not, O Cassandra?"
She stood with one hand on the back of Mary's chair, and looked up into the tree.
"The book should have been written in spring," she went on. "I feel the spring in my blood. Why should I, Mary, now when it is full summer, and the trees are dark?"