It is a remunerative rate of work, and the intervals are comfortable!" One morning, as the two young men were lounging on the sun-warmed grass at the foot of one of the slanting pines of the Villa Mondragone, Roderick delivered himself of a tissue of lugubrious speculations as to the possible mischances of one's genius.

"What if the watch should run down," he asked, "and you should lose the key?
What if you should wake up some morning and find it stopped, inexorably, appallingly stopped?
Such things have been, and the poor devils to whom they happened have had to grin and bear it.

The whole matter of genius is a mystery.

It bloweth where it listeth and we know nothing of its mechanism.

If it gets out of order we can't mend it; if it breaks down altogether we can't set it going again.