“Yes, yes, my serious work is just begun. I’m a man of slow development. I feel that. I know my faults and my weaknesses. I’m getting myself in hand. Now, Garland, I’m with you in your purposes, but I go a different way. You go into things direct. I’m naturally allusive. My work is almost always allusive, if you’ve noticed.”
“Do you write rapidly?”
“I write my verse easily, but my prose I sweat over. Don’t you?”
“I toil in revision even when I have what the other fellows call an inspiration.”
“I tell you, Garland, genius is not in it. It’s work and patience, and staying with a thing. Inspiration is all right and pretty and a suggestion, but it’s when a man gets a pen in his hand and sweats blood, that inspiration begins to enter in.”
“Well, what are your plans for the future—your readers want to know that?”
His face glowed as he replied, “I’m going to write a sentimental life of Horace. We know mighty little of him, but what I don’t know I’ll make up. I’ll write such a life as he must have lived. The life we all live when boys.”
The younger man put up his notes, and they walked down and out under the trees with the gibbous moon shining through the gently moving leaves. They passed a couple of young people walking slow—his voice a murmur, hers a whisper.