human
My dear master, how, after all, are you going to do it? I asked.
gpt
It's infinitely noble, but what time it will take, what patience and independence, what assured, what perfect conditions it will demand! Oh for a lone isle in a tepid sea!
human
Isn't this practically a lone isle, and aren't you, as an encircling medium, tepid enough? he replied; alluding with a laugh to the wonder of my young admiration and the narrow limits of his little provincial home.
gpt
Time isn't what I've lacked hitherto: the question hasn't been to find it, but to use it. Of course my illness made a great hole, but I daresay there would have been a hole at any rate. The earth we tread has more pockets than a billiard-table. The great thing is now to keep on my feet.
human
That's exactly what I mean.
gpt
It isn't as if I weren't all right.
human
Oh, if you weren't all right I wouldn't look at you!
gpt
If I weren't better I shouldn't have thought of _that_!
human
I don't want to be discouraging, but that's not true, I returned.
gpt
I'm sure that during the months you lay here in pain you had visitations sublime. You thought of a thousand things. You think of more and more all the while. That's what makes you, if you will pardon my familiarity, so respectable. At a time when so many people are spent you come into your second wind. But, thank God, all the same, you're better! Thank God, too, you're not, as you were telling me yesterday, 'successful.' If _you_ weren't a failure, what would be the use of trying? That's my one reserve on the subject of your recovery--that it makes you 'score,' as the newspapers say. It looks well in the newspapers, and almost anything that does that is horrible. 'We are happy to announce that Mr. Paraday, the celebrated author, is again in the enjoyment of excellent health.' Somehow I shouldn't like to see it.
human
You won't see it; I'm not in the least celebrated--my obscurity protects me. But couldn't you bear even to see I was dying or dead?
gpt
Dead--_passe encore_; there's nothing so safe. One never knows what a living artist may do--one has mourned so many. However, one must make the worst of it; you must be as dead as you can.
human
Don't I meet that condition in having just published a book?
gpt
Adequately, let us hope; for the book is verily a masterpiece.
human
Sherry, sir? was about his modest mahogany. He allowed half his income to his wife, from whom he had succeeded in separating without redundancy of legend. I had a general faith in his having behaved well, and I had once, in London, taken Mrs. Paraday down to dinner. He now turned to speak to the maid, who offered him, on a tray, some card or note, while agitated, excited, I wandered to the end of the garden. The idea of his security became supremely dear to me, and I asked myself if I were the same young man who had come down a few days before to scatter him to the four winds. When I retraced my steps he had gone into the house and the woman (the second London post had come in) had placed my letters and a newspaper on a bench. I sat down there to the letters, which were a brief business, and then, without heeding the address, took the paper from its envelope. It was the journal of highest renown, _The Empire_ of that morning. It regularly came to Paraday, but I remembered that neither of us had yet looked at the copy already delivered. This one had a great mark on the