Love tormented him and overrode his will, so that, despite all determination, he found himself at the little ink-stained table.

The sonnet he composed that night was the first of a love-cycle of fifty sonnets which was completed within two months.

He had the "Love-sonnets from the Portuguese" in mind as he wrote, and he wrote under the best conditions for great work, at a climacteric of living, in the throes of his own sweet love-madness.
The many hours he was not with Ruth he devoted to the "Love-cycle," to reading at home, or to the public reading-rooms, where he got more closely in touch with the magazines of the day and the nature of their policy and content.

The hours he spent with Ruth were maddening alike in promise and in inconclusiveness.

It was a week after he cured her headache that a moonlight sail on Lake Merritt was proposed by Norman and seconded by Arthur and Olney.