The reading took some days. Olivia, new to creative work, marvelled exceedingly at the magic of the artist’s invention. The personages of the drama, imaginary he said, lived as real beings. She regarded their creation as uncanny.
“But how do you know she felt like that?”
He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. “I can’t conceive her feeling otherwise.”
Yet, for all her wonder, she brought her swift intelligence to the task of criticism. Not since her mother’s illness had she taken anything so seriously. She lived in the book, walking meanwhile through an unreal world. Her golden words, on the other hand, the young man captured eagerly and set down in the margin of the manuscript. Half-way through the reading, they were on terms of Christian names. Minds so absorbed in an artistic pursuit grew impatient of absurd formalities of address. They slipped almost imperceptibly into the Olivia and Alexis habit. At the end they pulled themselves up rather sharply, with blank looks at an immediate future bereft of common interest.
“I’ll have to begin another, right away, so that you can be with me from the very start,” he said.
“Have you an idea?”
“Not yet.”
“When will you have one?”
He didn’t know. What man spent with the creative effort of a novel has the vitality to beget another right away? He feels that the very last drop of all that he has known and suffered and enjoyed has been used to the making of the book. For the making of another nothing is left.
“I suppose I’ll have to lie fallow for a week or so,” said the young optimist.