Merrick had a little place at Riverdale, where he went occasionally to be near the Iron Works, and where he hid his week-ends when the world was too much with him.  
Here, on the following Saturday afternoon I found him awaiting me in a pleasant setting of books and prints and faded furniture.
 
We dined late, and smoked and talked in his book-walled study till the terrier on the hearth-rug stood up and yawned for bed. When we took the hint and moved toward the staircase I felt, not that I had found the old Merrick again, but that I was on his track, had come across traces of his passage here and there in the thick jungle that had grown up between us. But I had a feeling that when I finally came on the man himself he might be dead....
 
As we started upstairs he turned back with one of his shy movements, and walked into the study.
 
“Wait a bit!” he called to me.
 
I waited, and he came out in a moment carrying a limp folio.
 
“It’s typewritten. Will you take a look at it? I’ve been trying to get to work again,” he explained, thrusting the manuscript into my hand.
 
“What? Poetry, I hope?” I exclaimed.
 
He shook his head with a gleam of derision. “No—just general considerations. The fruit of fifty years of inexperience.”
 
He showed me to my room and said good-night.
 
The following afternoon we took a long walk inland, across the hills, and I said to Merrick what I could of his book. Unluckily there wasn’t much to say. The essays were , polished and cultivated; but they lacked the freshness and of his youthful work. I tried to my opinion behind the usual generalisations, but he broke through these feints with a quick thrust to the heart of my meaning.
 
“It’s worn down—blurred? Like the figures in the Cumnors’ ?”
 
I hesitated. “It’s a little too damned resigned,” I said.
 
“Ah,” he exclaimed, “so am I. Resigned.” He switched the bare brambles by the roadside. “A man can’t serve two masters.”
 
“You mean business and literature?”
 
“No; I mean theory and instinct. The gray tree and the green. You’ve got to choose which fruit you’ll try; and you don’t know till afterward which of the two has the dead core.”
 
“How can anybody be sure that only one of them has?&rdqu............