The novel never has
anything to do with the aforesaid new and romantic surroundings;
neither has it the faintest connection with anything the author has
ever seen. That would limit his imagination.
Once he was well settled in his new home, and the first excitement of
novel impressions had worn off, Bennington de Laney began to write
regularly three hours a day. He did his scribbling with a fountain pen,
on typewriter paper, and left a broad right-hand margin, just as he had
seen Brooks do. In it he experienced, above all, a delightful feeling
of power. He enjoyed to the full his ability to swing gorgeous involved
sentences, phrase after phrase, down the long arc of rhetoric, without
a pause, without a quiver, until they rushed unhasting up the other
slope to end in beautiful words, polysyllabic, but with just the right
number of syllables. Interspersed were short sentences. He counted the
words in one or the other of these two sorts, carefully noting the
relations they bore to each other. On occasions he despaired because
they did not bear the right relations. And he also dragged out,
squirming, the Anglo-Saxon and Latin derivations, and set them up in a
row that he might observe their respective numbers.
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