Only it is true that sometimes, when it rained, say, with that hopeless insistency which, I protest, is unknown anywhere else in the world; and when Marian was not immediately accessible, and cigarettes were not quite satisfactory, because the entire universe was so sodden that matches had to be judiciously coaxed before they would strike; and when if you happened to be writing a fervid letter to Rosalind Jemmett, let us say, the ink would not dry for ever so long:--why, it is true that in these circumstances you would feel a shade too like the wicked Lord So-and-So of a melodrama to be comfortable.
Yet even in these circumstances, reason told me that the Book was the main thing, that the girl would be thoroughly over the affair by November at latest, and that at the cost of a few inconsequent tears, she would have meanwhile immeasurably obliged posterity. And I knew that no man may ever write in perdurable fashion save by ruthlessly converting his own life into "copy," since of other persons' lives he can, at most, reproduce but the blurred and misinterpreted by-ends, by reason of almost any author's deplorable lack of omniscience. Yes, the Book was the main thing; and yet the girl--knowingly to dip my pen into her heart as into an inkstand was not, at best, chivalric....
"But the Book!" said I. "Why, I must be quite idiotically in love to think of letting that Book perish!" And I viciously added: "Confound the pretty simpleton!"...
