That bit
about the swimming and the character of Mrs. Mumps. But it doesn't hang
together. There's a great deal of repetition. It's as though you'd written
it with your mind on something else all the time."
And so he had--oh! so he had! What cruel irony that because his mind was
set to winning Clare back to him the chief means for gaining her should be
ruined by his very care for her.
What to do when all the things of life--the bustle and hurry, the marriages
and births and deaths--came in between him and his work so that he could
scarcely see it, so many things obscured the way. Poor Mortimer! Lost
indeed behind a shifting, whirring cloud of real life--never to emerge,
poor man, into anything better than a middle-aged clothes' prop.
For six weeks the book lingered in the advertisements. A second edition,
composed for the most part of an edition for America, was announced, there
were a belated review or two ... and then the end. The end of two years'
hopes, ambitions, struggles, sweat and tears--and the end, too, of how much
else?
From the beginning, so far back as he could remember, he had believed that
he would one day write great books; had believed it from no conceit in him
but simply because he clung so tenaciously to ambition that it had become,
again and again, almost realised in the intensity of his dreams of it.
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