Then at last they would sleep, her tears hung in the thickets of his chest.

The paper was still on the table. I hereby appoint Professor Rick L. Tucker . . .

I could make him suffer. I could sign it and give it to him tomorrow when we went walking.

“Mary Lou forgot this, Rick. By Jove, she earned it!”

Unspeakable! The vision of her, the glamour and the childish vulnerability caught me by the heart and the throat, nowhere else, it seemed. But there was a touch of panic too. I knew that the finger was on me, I was limed by her and would have to struggle to get myself free. Only the space of one day, morning, noon, night, to bring such change! It was there, the trap I had tried to avoid—and would avoid!—the bitter sorrow of a love that is fruitless, pointless, hopeless, agonizing and ridiculous. Once more, the clown’s trousers had fallen down.

I cursed myself inwardly, then protested to myself that all was not lost. The brandy was still on the table, the mature man’s consolation. Then, paper man that I am, I began to think—what a story!

Chapter VIII

I woke too early with a clear memory of the night before and the kind of parched distancing from reality which comes from considerable brandy. After the bathroom I went into the sitting-room and was not surprised to see that the brandy bottle was half empty. Strangely, though, apart from dryness, I had no hangover. Instead I had a thirst which I quenched with about six successive tumblers of mountain water. It seemed rather immoral to have drunk so much and not to be suffering for it, but the fact was undeniable, I was feeling physically as well as I had ever felt in my life. Rage and sorrow burn up alcohol. I remembered and examined my new thraldom and rebelled against it. Think no more of her is always the solution. For she had committed herself, there was no doubt of it, consented to shape her life on completing with him a charmed circle. It was all the more evident from the ludicrous and sordid non-transaction of the night before. Think no more of her, put that image out of the visualizing eye, for God’s sake, don’t be your age, that way madness lies. Think rather of him and his attempt at liming a literary bird—

Well. I would teach Professor Tucker a lesson he would never forget. I would take to my own weapons. I would put him in a book, a story, with such a viciously precise delineation that even Mary Lou would blush for him and the strange rich man Halliday laugh him out of his life.

Then, of course, the novelist’s truism popped out. It was no good putting the real, live Rick L. Tucker in a book. He had this in common with most of the human race—he was quite spectacularly unbelievable. There are things that novelists invent which they call characters but they aren’t. They’re constructs, shaved down out of some wood or other—a psychic plasma—into figures as like each other as Russian dolls. The only thing I could do was select, tone down, adjust, produce a comically loathsome figure, recognizable and tolerable because it was “only a story”.