He didn’t want to work. He didn’t intend to do any more writing, anyway, without the close coöperation of Eris. Something, evidently, was the matter with his work and he was certain that she was capable of telling him what it was. He knew that he was going to take a new view of things in general, but he wanted her to point it out. He wanted to start right; and be kept on the track for a while until accustomed.
That, insensibly, he had become dependent upon the mind of another person, did not occur to him. At least not definitely.
He realised that the world meant Eris, and that without Eris he had no other interest in the world, now.
And, to this man who never before had evinced any interest in the world except as it concerned himself, it did not seem odd that every vital principle in him now surged around and enveloped this girl. The girl he had found asleep in a public park.
Wherever he went, whatever he was doing, his mind was on her. Not selfishly; although a deep instinct was always telling him that whatever real work he ever was to do would come through her.
Nor did he seem to think it odd that his personal ambition now remained in abeyance. Fluency, too, seemed to have departed: nimble mind and facile pen, the careless arrogance of youth and power, the almost effortless ability, flippant juggling with phrase and word, and the gay contempt for the emotion with which his audience responded when he tossed up the letters of the alphabet and let them fall into words—all these seem to have died.
Without analysing it he was feeling already the tension of a new gravity in his character. It came, perhaps, from the constant presence of an unknown god—the one that always seemed to be waiting at the elbow of Eris—waiting to be recognized before speaking. The god with a thousand faces whose name is Truth.
He appeared to be on friendly terms with Eris. But Annan had not yet become familiar with his faces.
CHAPTER XXXII
WHEN Eris decided to go home she gave her lover a few hours’ notice and went without further preliminaries or fuss.