So ended the Quest of the Lady Elaine.
With a sigh, Harlan wrote the last words and pushed the paper from him, staring blankly at the wall and seeing nothing. His labour was at an end, all save the final copying, and the painstaking daily revision which would take weeks longer. The exaltation he had expected to be conscious of was utterly absent; instead of it, he had a sense of loss, of change.
His surroundings seemed hopelessly sordid and ugly, now that the glow was gone. All unknowingly, when Harlan pencilled: “The End,” in fanciful letters at the bottom of the last page, he had had practically his last joy of his book. The torturing process of revision was to take all the life out of it. Sentences born of surging emotion would seem vapid and foolish when subjected to the cold, critical eye of his reason, yet he knew, dimly, that he must not change it too much.
“I’ll let it get cool,” he thought, “before I do anything more to it.”
Yet, now, it was difficult to stop working. The rented typewriter, with its enticing bank of keys, was close at hand. A thousand sheets of paper and a box of carbon waited in the drawer of Uncle Ebeneezer’s desk. His worn Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases was at his elbow. And they were poor. Then Harlan laughed, for they were no longer poor, and he had wholly forgotten it.
There was a step upon the porch outside, then Dorothy came into the hall. She paused outside the library door for a moment, ostensibly to tie her shoe, but in reality to listen. A wave of remorseful tenderness overwhelmed Harlan and he unlocked the door. “Come in,” he said, smiling. “You needn’t be afraid to come in any more. The book is all done.”
“O Harlan, is it truly done?” There was no gladness in her voice, only relief. Doubt was in every intonation of her sentence; incredulity in every line of her body.
With this pitiless new insight of his, Harlan saw how she had felt for these last weeks and became very tenderly anxious not to hurt her; to shield his transformed self from her quick understanding.
“Really,” he answered. “Have I been a beast, Dorothy?”
The question was so like the boy she used to know that her heart leaped wildly, then became portentously still.