90 The Real Charlotte. 



by the making and lighting of a fresh cigarette pioved fatal to 

 the prospects of the sonnet. He felt disgusted with himself 

 and his own futility. When he had been at Oxford not 

 thus had the springs of inspiration ceased to flow. He had 

 begun to pass the period of water-colours then, but not the 

 period when ideas are as plenty and as full of novelty as 

 leaves in spring, and the knowledge has not yet come that 

 they, like the leaves, are old as the world itself. 



For the past three or four years the social exigencies of 

 Government House life had not proved conducive to 

 fervour of any kind, and now, while he was dawdling away 

 his time at Bruff, in the uninterested expectation of another 

 appointment, he found that he not only could not write, 

 but that he seemed to have lost the wish to try. 



^' I suppose I am sinking into the usual bucolic stupor," 

 he said to himself, as he abandoned the search for the 

 vagrant rhyme. " If I only could read the Field, and had 

 a more spontaneous habit of cursing, I should be an ideal 

 country gentleman." 



He crumpled into his pocket again the envelope on the 

 back of which he had been scribbUng, and told himself that 

 it was more philosophic and more simple to enjoy things in 

 the homely, pre-historic manner, without trying to express 

 them elaborately for the benefit of others. He was in- 

 tellectually effete, and what made his effeteness more hope- 

 less was that he recognised it himself " I am perfectly 

 happy if I let myself alone," was the sum of his reflections. 

 " They gave me a little more cuhure than I could hold, and 

 it ran over the edge at first. Now I think I'm just about 

 sufficiently up in the bottle for Lismoyle form." He tilted 

 his straw hat over his nose, shut his eyes, and, leaning back, 

 soon felt the delicious fusion into his brain of the surround- 

 ing hum and soft movement that tells of the coming of out- 

 of-door summer sleep. 



It is deplorable to think of the figure Christopher must 

 cut in the eyes of those whose robuster taste demands in a 

 young man some more potent and heroic qualities, a 

 gentlemanly hardihood in language and liquor, an interest- 

 ing suggestion of moral obliquity, or, at least, some heredi- 

 tary vice on which the character may make shipwreck with 

 magnificent helplessness. Christopher, with his preference 



