Page:Stringer - Wine of Life.djvu/216



DECENT book isn't written, as a rule; it's re-written," Chester Hardy had announced in extenuation of the somewhat sweeping changes which he had suggested to Storrow after going through the younger author's manuscript. And the truth of this came home to Storrow as he did what he could to carry out these suggestions. Even his final con- viction that the older man was right did not serve to render his labour any less difficult and any less lugubrious. Once persuaded that the issue was closed, that the work was complete, its reopening took on the nature of a post- mortem, proving almost as gloomy a bit of business as the re-opening of a coffin. He was tired of the thing. The last of his enthusiasm seemed burned out, and the puppets of his creation, to his jaundiced eye, took on the soiled and faded aspect of counter-goods too frequently handled.

But he worked on doggedly, even if under difficulties. It began to tell a little, both on nerves and temper, for he found that he slept now only after a more and more sub- stantial " night-cap.'' He also found Torrie's incon- sequential comings and goings, her haphazard callers, her lighthearted lack of order, a provocation to quick and unreasoning irritability. And this in turn reacted on Torrie, who complained of his preoccupation, of the lack of comforts in the studio, of the housekeeping hardships involved in such quarters. She became more and more silent, more and more self-contained.

"If we're going to live in this dump," she announced one morning after journeying for the second time down 206