“Don’t stop,” said Emily, returning. “I like talk that is unfit for me. It is having to get used to Nicholas, who is not the slave of convention, as he says. Fancy being able to say that truthfully!”
“I believe in the interest of oneself, you know,” said Herrick, going on as if he had not heard his sister. “I take the deepest interest in myself, apart from egotism of personality, though I may have that. And I have no condemnation for egotists. I think they are often the higher type.”
“This is not the kind of unfitness I meant,” said Emily. “It does sound wicked, but not with a wickedness that I like.”
“I think on the whole they are not,” said Masson.
“You could not be an egotist, William, whether or no you wanted it,” said Bumpus.
“Surely everybody would want it,” said Emily. “I am sure it would be dreadful not to be one. Isn’t it, William?”
“Egotism is a gift, like anything else,” said Herrick.
“Then I grow prouder and prouder of you, darling,” said Emily. “An author and an egotist, and both of them such lovely things.”
“I suppose your book is a novel, Herrick? Mine is,” said Bumpus.
“Yes, yes. A short novel,” said Herrick. “I hold no brief for long books, as I say.”
“Real books coming out of our own heads!” said Bumpus. “And not just printed unkindness to other people’s.”
“My first original piece of writing!” said Herrick. “That I should have to say it at seventy! Not just what Richard has said. Ah, I have felt that. Not that I have not done good work in that way. And it all has to be done. But my first book. Probably my only book, though many would be surprised to hear me say so. I thrill like a youth at the thought of seeing it out.”
“Oh, so do I,” said Emily. “But not like a youth. Though I should love to do that once again. And it is better and safer at seventy. It will have to have the respect due to age, anyhow. But I am afraid Mr. Merry will think it is a story book. Perhaps we had better keep it from him.”
“He must know about it when it comes out,” said Masson.
“No, I don’t think Mr. Merry knows about books when they come out,” said Emily.
Masson and Bumpus returned to the college, entered Masson’s rooms, and sat for a time in silence.
“Well, William,” said Bumpus, “I have protested that I have written a book. You must know that it is your part to seem to want to talk about it.”
“If you would like to talk of it with me,” said Masson. “I think that men who take only to science, cannot be on the point enough in these things to be bearable.”
“I suppose you will not read it,” said Bumpus. “Or if you do, will not tell me what you think of it.”
“Am—am I of the sort to read it?” said Masson. “I hesitate, as I say, to inflict the alien touch.”
“It is this that thirty years has brought us to,” said Bumpus.
“I—I think it is a good thing to come to, to keep to,” said Masson, his voice going high. “I think it is the worst thing about intimacy, that it may blunt every edge.”
“Yes, yes. Edges are the only thing,” said Bumpus. “It is odd about Herrick, isn’t it? His writing a book.”
“Odd, is it?” said Masson. “Oughtn’t he to have written before?”
“That does seem to me the alien touch,” said Bumpus.
“Well, perhaps it will hardly be a good book,” said Masson.
Bumpus laughed.
“I should have said that Herrick knew too well for that. He has his hand on his name with great skill. ‘Oughtn’t he to have written?’ That is what he has done. I don’t follow. It is certainly odd how both he and I seem to have come to it suddenly. It is dwelling on the time when I sacrificed my other book, that has brought me to it. My mind has been on it lately. I don’t know why I should be sensitive about it. My feelings had nothing in them to be ashamed of. This book seems to start out of all that, somehow, to go on from it. Well, there is nothing between.”
“In that way,” said Masson. “You—you feel deeply about the book, Richard?”
“Yes,” said Bumpus, leaning forward, looking small and tense and alive. “I have wanted to write all my life, felt it was this, it was mine to want. And it seemed not to come to me, after the early time when things happened as we know. There seems to be one book in a good many of us. And, of course, that one book of mine was mine no longer.”
“No, no,” said Masson, not raising his eyes.
“So this means much to me,” said Bumpus, looking at Masson.
“It—it means then much to me,” said Masson. “Perhaps Herrick’s book is the one book in him that is in many of us.”
“No,” said Bumpus, laughing. “I have more than one in me, and Herrick has not one at all.”
“Then the book must explain itself,” said Masson.
“I believe I am capable of any meanness,” said Bumpus suddenly, “short of actually cheating people of their own.”
“Is there much meanness short of some form of that,” said Masson.
“No, no, none that matters,” said Bumpus.
III
The Reverend Peter Fletcher was a frail little elderly man, with a long, black beard, and a colourless face that carried a humorous kindliness. His wife, Theresa, was a large old woman, with fierce eyes looking out between a massive brow and chin. His sister, Miss Lydia Fletcher, was a clumsy-looking woman of sixty, with a broad,
