But I tell you what, Mrs.
Wharncliffe, if it wouldn't be giving you a great deal of trouble--I'm sorry you were troubled to get my head back again--but if you would just look over, since you are so tall, and I'll run down and act Lady Lettice." "Why couldn't Paul go downstairs and look at the lady in comfort ?" asked my mother.
Derrick mused a little.
"He might look at her through a crack in the door at the foot of the stairs, perhaps, but that would seem mean, somehow.

It would be a pity, too, not to use the gallery; galleries are uncommon, you see, and you can get cracked doors anywhere.

And, you know, he was obliged to look at her when she couldn't see him, because their fathers were on different sides in the war, and dreadful enemies." When school-days came, matters went on much in the same way; there was always an abominably scribbled tale stowed away in Derrick's desk, and he worked infinitely harder than I did, because there was always before him this determination to be an author and to prepare himself for the life.

But he wrote merely from love of it, and with no idea of publication until the beginning of our last year at Oxford, when, having reached the ripe age of one-and-twenty, he determined to delay no longer, but to plunge boldly into his first novel.
He was seldom able to get more than six or eight hours a week for it, because he was reading rather hard, so that the novel progressed but slowly.

Finally, to my astonishment, it came to a dead stand-still.
I have never made out exactly what was wrong with Derrick then, though I know that he passed through a terrible time of doubt and despair.