Chapter 6 - Page 2

seated myself
behind him. He continued to read.

"I hadn't seen these rooms before," I said, for want of something to
say.

The room was not so much scantily as arbitrarily furnished. It contained
a big mahogany sideboard; a common deal table, an extraordinary kind of
folding wash-hand-stand; a deal bookshelf, the cane lounge, and three
unrelated chairs. There were three framed Dutch prints on the marble
mantel-shelf; striped curtains before the windows. A square, cheap
looking-glass, with a razor above it, hung between them. And on the
floor, on the chairs, on the sideboard, on the unmade bed, the profusion
of manuscripts.

He scribbled something on a blue paper and began to roll a cigarette. He
took off his glasses, rubbed them, and closed his eyes tightly.

"Well, and how's Sussex?" he asked.

I felt a sudden attack of what, essentially, was nostalgia. The fact
that I was really leaving an old course of life, was actually and
finally breaking with it, became vividly apparent. Lea, you see, stood
for what was best in the mode of thought that I was casting aside. He
stood for the aspiration. The brooding, the moodiness; all the childish
qualities, were my own importations. I was a little ashamed to tell him,
that--that I was going to live, in fact. Some of the glory of it had
gone, as if one of two candles I had been reading by had flickered out.
But I told him, after a fashion, that I had got a job at last.

"Oh, I congratulate you," he said.

"You see," I began to combat the objections he had not had time to
utter, "even for my work it will be a good thing--I wasn't seeing
enough of life to be able to...."

"Oh, of course not," he answered--"it'll be a good thing. You must have
been having a pretty bad time."

It struck me as abominably unfair. I hadn't taken up with the _Hour_
because I was tired of having a bad time, but for other reasons: because
I had felt my soul being crushed within me.

"You're mistaken," I said. And I explained. He answered, "Yes, yes," but
I fancied that he was adding to himself--"They all say that." I grew
more angry. Lea's opinion formed, to some extent, the background of my
life. For many years I had been writing quite as much to satisfy him as
to satisfy myself, and his coldness chilled me. He thought that my heart
was not in my work, and I did not want Lea to think that of me. I tried
to explain as much to him--but it was difficult, and he gave me no help.

I knew there had been others that he had fostered, only to see them, in
the end, drift into the back-wash. And now he thought I was going
too....

"Here,"