"After diagnosis," said Dr. Gaisford, "the prudent physician bases treatment on self-interest. You're not fit to travel by yourself yet, Eric; when I've patched you up, I shall send you away. If you don't go, you'll never do any decent work again."
Having persuaded his patient to stay in bed for a week, the doctor looked in nightly "for five minutes" and stayed sixty-five, smoking three disreputable pipes instead of one and generalizing on life and health.
"It gives me a headache even to think of work," said Eric, his brain half-paralyzed with bromide.
Perhaps it was the bromide, perhaps it was his nervous and bodily exhaustion; the most frightening part of this latest illness was the attendant utter incapacity to make up his mind. When Barbara left him for Crawleigh Abbey, he had resigned from his department and withdrawn the resignation, accepted an invitation to lecture in America—and cancelled the acceptance; every night he led Gaisford through the same argumentative maze; complete rest, partial rest in London or the country, flight from England and all association with Barbara, full work—as soon as he could resume it—to keep him from brooding about her; he could not decide. And from time to time a mocking refrain told him that as an undergraduate and again in the first flush of fame he had aspired to be the new young Byron, dominating London.…
"Poisoned rat in a hole," he whispered to himself.…
Gaisford would sit with his arms crossed over the back of a chair and his feet twisted round its legs, puffing thoughtfully at his pipe and frowning at his boots. In a long experience of practice among rich and self-conscious patients who would always rather be "interesting" than normal, it was not the first time that he had watched the bloom being rubbed off love; nine broken engagements and balked romances were born of doltish delay; but a mass of sensibility like Eric Lane had not the stamina to wait nor the placidity to go away and forget.
"You told me you had a novel on the stocks," said Gaisford. "I suppose you wouldn't let me see it?"
The first draft of the book was already in type, and, though Eric hated his work to be seen before he had set the last polish on it, the new indecision and weakness of will allowed him to be overpersuaded. Gaisford brought back the manuscript at the end of three days and talked of neurotic impressionism and the methods of literary jerry-builders.
"I hope you're not writing yourself out," he added.
Eric was frightened for the first time since the "Divorce" placed him beyond the reach of want. So many men seemed capable of one play or novel—and then no more.