Oh, hang the Major! I don't care about him, I want to know about you,"
I cried.

"About me?" said Derrick doubtfully. "Oh, I'm right enough."

"What do you do with yourself? How on earth do you kill time?" I asked.
"Come, give me a full, true, and particular account of it all."

"We have tried three other servants," said Derrick; "but the plan
doesn't answer. They either won't stand it, or else they are bribed
into smuggling brandy into the house. I find I can do most things for my
father, and in the morning he has an attendant from the hospital who is
trustworthy, and who does what is necessary for him. At ten we breakfast
together, then there are the morning papers, which he likes to have read
to him. After that I go round to the Pump Room with him--odd contrast
now to what it must have been when Bath was the rage. Then we have
lunch. In the afternoon, if he is well enough, we drive; if not he
sleeps, and I get a walk. Later on an old Indian friend of his will
sometimes drop in; if not he likes to be read to until dinner. After
dinner we play chess--he is a first-rate player. At ten I help him to
bed; from eleven to twelve I smoke and study Socialism and all the rest
of it that Lynwood is at present floundering in."

"Why don't you write, then?"

"I tried it, but it didn't answer. I couldn't sleep after it, and was,
in fact, too tired; seems absurd to be tired after such a day as that,
but somehow it takes it out of one more than the hardest reading; I
don't know why."

"Why," I said angrily, "it's because it is work to which you are quite
unsuited--work for a thick-skinned, hard-hearted, uncultivated and
well-paid attendant, not for the novelist who is to be the chief light
of our generation."

He laughed at this estimate of his powers.

"Novelists, like other cattle, have to obey their owner," he said
lightly.

I thought for a moment that he meant the Major, and was breaking into an
angry remonstrance, when I saw that he meant something quite different.
It was always his strongest point, this extraordinary consciousness of
right, this unwavering belief that he had to do and therefore could do
certain things. Without this, I know that he never wrote a line, and in
my heart I believe this was the cause of his success.

"Then you are not writing at all?" I asked.

"Yes, I write generally for a couple of hours before breakfast," he
said.

And that evening we sat by his gas stove and he read me the next fo