" 'Right,' said I. 'Come
along at once and collect your fee, for I haven't any time to
spare.'
"I thought it possible that Farrell might break his journey to
dally with the gaieties of Paris. But he didn't. I found out
easily enough at Cook's Office there that he had booked a
sleeper and gone straight through. So I went to the Opera,
listened to _Rigoletto_, idled most of the next day in the old
haunts, and took the usual Sud-Express, with a sleeper, from the
Gare de Lyons.
"No: I lie. You can't call it idling when you sit--say in the
Bois, on any chance bench anywhere--seeing nothing, letting the
carriages go by like an idle show of phenomena, but with your
whole soul thrilling to a new idea, drinking it in, pushing out
new fibres which grow as they suck in more of it through small
new ducts, with a ripple and again a choke and yet again a
gurgle, which you orchestrate into a sound of deep waters
combining as you draw them home. . . . Oh, yes--you may laugh:
but I know now what conception is: what Shakespeare felt like
when he sat one night, in a garden, and the great plot of
_Othello_ came teeming.
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