He used a thick yellowish paper cut quite square, and wrote a
very small, neat, upright hand, as clear and legible as print. Every time
I found him at his desk and saw those closely covered pages multiplying
under his hand, I used to wonder what he could have to write about, and
for whose eyes that elaborate manuscript was intended.
"How cold you are, Monsieur Maurice!" I used to say. "You are as cold as my
snow-man in the court-yard! Won't you come out to-day for half-an-hour?"
And his hands, in truth, were always ice-like, even though the hearth was
heaped with blazing logs.
"Not to-day, petite," he would reply. "It is too bleak for me--and besides,
you see, I am writing."
It was his invariable reply. He was always writing--or if not writing,
reading; or brooding listlessly over the fire. And so he grew paler every
day.
"But the writing can wait, Monsieur Maurice," I urged one morning, "and you
can't always be reading the same old books over and over again!"
"Some books never grow old, little Gretchen," he replied. "This, for
instance, is quite new; and yet it was written by one Horatius Flaccus
somewhere about eighteen hundred years ago."
"But the sun is really shining this morning, Monsieur Maurice!"
"_Comment_!" he said, smiling.
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