Apropos of Annan and his stories, Coltfoot had made this objection, saying that the literary explosion never seemed to be spontaneous, and charging the author with secreting in the heap a firecracker of commercial manufacture.
Coltfoot, in the absence of Eris, began to frequent Annan. A rudderless ship, a homeless pup, a gasless flivver—these similes haunted him whenever he beheld the quenched features of Barry Annan.
Annan had been candid with him. It was love, he admitted, that knocked every other ambition out of him.
And, at first, Coltfoot thought so, although in his case with Rosalind, love was proving a stimulus to effort amazing, resembling inspiration.
But gradually a disturbing explanation for Annan’s idleness forced itself upon Coltfoot. The boy’s motive power seemed to be suspended.
Except for the personal pleasure Annan had taken in his mental acrobatics, there never had been anything inspired in his work until he began his latest novel—still merely blocked in.
But this story had in it, carefully and skilfully laid, a deep-bedded foundation of truth. And work on it began from the day that Eris had promised to become his wife.
Through all the upsetting excitement of the boy’s courtship, the inception of the story had produced nothing material.
In the glow of glorious certainty it had flowered under the girl’s tender ministry.
In her absence, now, all growth ceased.