Milvain's advice to him had of course proved useless. The
sensational title suggested nothing, or only ragged shapes of
incomplete humanity that fluttered mockingly when he strove to
fix them. But he had decided upon a story of the kind natural to
him; a 'thin' story, and one which it would be difficult to spin
into three volumes. His own, at all events. The title was always
a matter for head-racking when the book was finished; he had
never yet chosen it before beginning.
For a week he got on at the desired rate; then came once more the
crisis he had anticipated.
A familiar symptom of the malady which falls upon outwearied
imagination. There were floating in his mind five or six possible
subjects for a book, all dating back to the time when he first
began novel-writing, when ideas came freshly to him. If he
grasped desperately at one of these, and did his best to develop
it, for a day or two he could almost content himself; characters,
situations, lines of motive, were laboriously schemed, and he
felt ready to begin writing. But scarcely had he done a chapter
or two when all the structure fell into flatness.
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