He lay down again, stiffly humiliated, and tried to compose his feelings. These things happen, he told himself. Young hawks pick out old hawks’ eyes, each generation begins its course with such a stirrup-cup; and at the end of a career of honest work with small thanks for it, there is even a sort of compliment in being found worth stealing from. ‘Dear Mr Leigh’—the letter might be sent, after all—‘Thank you for your kind attention to my writings. I am gratified to find that they have been of use to you.’ But his resentment could not be sneered away. It had too much grief in it. He grieved for the brief duration of his pleasure in the book, he grieved for his dreamily decaying wits, and his grief was made weightier by a sense of bereavement. For the time was gone by when he had enjoyed his reputation of singularity, of being the only writer to write like Matthew Bateman. In Reverse the Sun there had been something corroborative, a look of kindred—so he had thought, till the look of kindred was reshaped into a pasteboard mask held before a thief’s face. How could he have become so dull that he did not recognize his own imitation? Loveday herself could not have failed to notice it. Everyone must notice it. His anger, once more charging ahead, plunged him into another morass. Why should anyone notice it? He was known by his reputation, not by his books. At best, a 133few people reading Norman Leigh might remark on a slight influence of Matthew Bateman, which it was to be hoped would soon be shed.

He could bear it no longer. He had drugs beside him, and in the next room there was alcohol, but for him there was only one reliable form of dramming. He got up, dressed and went grimly to his desk. With the beard poking from his jaws, he sat till the first blade of sunrise thrust through the curtain-chink. Writing fluently, he had covered a dozen pages. He drew them together, astonished to find so much accomplished. Perhaps, after all, he might live to be grateful to Loveday’s lending library author. Mettled by jealousy, roused from being the unique Matthew Bateman into being a competitor, he had not done so badly. He sorted the new pages into order, and was laying them down, when a sentence caught his eye. It wouldn’t do. He was ringing it, when another sentence grimaced at him from further down the page. He read more attentively. Everything he had written that night smelled of Norman Leigh.

Too tired for any more rages, he groaned, and looked out of the window, rubbing his cheeks. Here was another day. The sky was clouding over, the macrocarpus hedge twitched before an oncoming wind. It would be a day to write in; but as things stood, it was the day when Loveday would come back. Before she came, there would be brewers, bakers and candlestick-makers coming to the door, and he must shave and spruce himself. That meant the electric kettle. He walked into the kitchen. It retained the previous night as a bed retains an act of carnality. The meal was still on 134the table, the unwashed saucepans stood hardening on the stove, the sink was littered with onion peelings and grains of rice. Lying in the crumpled cretonne lap of the armchair, and occupying the whole kitchen, was Reverse the Sun.