"With a snub-nosed Helen, my boy," Repellier had once said, "there would never have been a Trojan war." Hartley, valiant with the wine of his new resolve, straightway began to wonder how or why he had so recently posed as a second Schopenhauer to this same Repellier, and cried in disgust that everything had already been sufficiently cursed or sufficiently sung. His passion for work came back to him with a bound. The Cyrus of unrest that had diverted his better thoughts from their natural channel seemed to have marched on and left the Euphrates of his heart in full flood once more. He knew that his vague mental acrisia had at last come to a turn, and was to be followed by its violent fever to create, to build.
In one illuminating moment he saw that the modern life about which it was now his task to write was no less strenuous and no less varied than the life of those earlier days toward which he had fallen into the habit of looking back so regretfully. But it was in the inner rather than in the outer life, he felt, that the greater intensity and interest were now to be found. It was the mental career of men and women that was becoming more complex and more varied; and it was in this, he saw, that the broader and more enduring field of the novelist lay. At times, indeed, the alluring complexity and bewildering activity of this inner subjective world spread before him like an endless valley of untrodden twilight, shot through with some emotional golden glory of retrospection. And he longed for some fuller power to pierce into it, and grasp it, and interpret it.
With this elemental touch of rapture still clinging about him he went back to his manuscript of The Unwise Virgins. The spell of The Silver Poppy too seemed, in some way, still pregnantly close to him, and through some little trick of the hand or mind he found himself from time to time dropping into the touch of that earlier effort.
He began at the first and rewrote the entire book. Whipping his earlier erratic chapters into line, he quirted and corralled the herd of them into one unified, crowded whole. He went at his manuscript with a trace, almost, of the madman in him as he worked. Sometimes he ate, and sometimes he forgot to, or refused to spare time for it. He worked late into the night; sometimes all night long. He worked as he had seen Oxfordshire farmers working at raising bees, under stress and the cry of excitement, lifting and heaving beyond his natural strength, with an ardor that was to leave him stiff and sore, yet with the balm of knowing that one hour of exhilaration, to the artist, was worth its day of depression.