Chapter 7

VII.

OF some new ferment at work in him Nick Lansing himself was
equally aware. He was a better judge of the book he was trying
to write than either Susy or Strefford; he knew its weaknesses,
its treacheries, its tendency to slip through his fingers just
as he thought his grasp tightest; but he knew also that at the
very moment when it seemed to have failed him it would suddenly
be back, beating its loud wings in his face.

He had no delusions as to its commercial value, and had winced
more than he triumphed when Susy produced her allusion to
Marius. His book was to be called The Pageant of Alexander.
His imagination had been enchanted by the idea of picturing the
young conqueror's advance through the fabulous landscapes of
Asia: he liked writing descriptions, and vaguely felt that
under the guise of fiction he could develop his theory of
Oriental influences in Western art at the expense of less
learning than if he had tried to put his ideas into an essay.
He knew enough of his subject to know that he did not know
enough to write about it; but he consoled himself by remembering
that Wilhelm Meister has survived many weighty volumes on
aesthetics; and between his moments of self-disgust he took
himself at Susy's valuation, and found an unmixed joy in his
task.

Never--no, never!--had he been so boundlessly, so confidently
happy. His hack-work had given him the habit of application,
and now habit wore the glow of inspiration. His previous
literary ventures had been timid and tentative: if this one was
growing and strengthening on his hands, it must be because the
conditions were so different. He was at ease, he was secure, he
was satisfied; and he had also, for the first time since his
early youth, before his mother's death, the sense of having some
one to look after, some one who was his own particular care, and
to whom he was answerable for himself and his actions, as he had
never felt himself answerable to the hurried and indifferent
people among whom he had chosen to live.

Susy had the same standards as these people: she spoke their
language, though she understood others, she required their
pleasures if she did not revere their gods. But from the moment
that she had become his property he had built up in himself a
conception of her answering to some deep-seated need of
veneration. She was his, he had chosen her, she had taken her
place in the long line of Lansing women who had been loved,
honoured, and probably deceived, by bygone Lansing men. He
didn't pretend to understand the logic of it; but the fact that
she was his wife gave purpose and continuity to his scattered
impulses, and a mysterious glow of consecration to his task.

Once or twice, in