So Melinda clenched her hands and moaned in the same key with the east
wind and told the four walls of her room that she could not endure it;
she must _do_ something. Then it was, that in a flash of inspiration, it
came to her--she would write a humorous story.
The artistic fitness of the idea pleased her. She had always understood
that humorists were marked by a deep-dyed melancholy, that the height of
unhappiness was a vantage-ground from which to view the joke of
existence. She would test the dictum; now, if ever, she would write
humorously. The material was at hand, seething and crowding in her mind,
in fact--the monumental dullness and complacent narrowness of the
villagers, the egoism, the conceit, the bland shepherd-of-his-flock
pomposity of John Graham. What more could a humorist desire? Yes; she
would write.
Thoughts came quick and fast; words flowed in a fiery stream like lava
that glows and rushes and curls and leaps down the mountain, sweeping
all obstacles aside. (The figure did not wholly please Melinda, for
everybody knows how dull and gray and uninteresting lava is when it
cools, but she had no time to bother with another.) She felt the
exultation, the joy and uplifting of spirit that is the reward--usually,
alas, the sole reward--of the writer in the work of creation.
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