"What novels do you write?" she asked.
"I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; "the things people
don't say. But the difficulty is immense." He sighed. "However, you
don't care," he continued. He looked at her almost severely. "Nobody
cares. All you read a novel for is to see what sort of person the writer
is, and, if you know him, which of his friends he's put in. As for the
novel itself, the whole conception, the way one's seen the thing,
felt about it, make it stand in relation to other things, not one in
a million cares for that. And yet I sometimes wonder whether there's
anything else in the whole world worth doing. These other people," he
indicated the hotel, "are always wanting something they can't get. But
there's an extraordinary satisfaction in writing, even in the attempt
to write. What you said just now is true: one doesn't want to be things;
one wants merely to be allowed to see them."
Some of the satisfaction of which he spoke came into his face as he
gazed out to sea.
It was Rachel's turn now to feel depressed. As he talked of writing he
had become suddenly impersonal. He might never care for any one; all
that desire to know her and get at her, which she had felt pressing on
her almost painfully, had completely vanished.
"Are you a good writer?" she asked.
"Yes," he said. "I'm not first-rate, of course; I'm good second-rate;
about as good as Thackeray, I should say.
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