e room.

"Ah, got back, Victor?"

"Yes," I said, looking up.

"They've rejected your last, eh?" he said at once.

"Yes. Why? Have they sent it? How did you know it was rejected?"

"By your face, my dear boy," answered my father.

"It's odd that these failures knock you up still. You must be
accustomed to them now!"

That was cutting, and it cut.

"One does not easily get accustomed to anything that is against natural
law," I said, coldly.

"Oh! and you mean that it is against the natural law of things that so
brilliant a genius as yourself should be perpetually rejected?"

I nodded. "Just so," I answered.

"It is a pity they will not take your estimation of your own powers!"

"There is very little difference in the estimation," I said. "The
difference is in the courage. I have the courage to write things they
have not the courage to print. There is no question as to my powers. No
one, except yourself, perhaps, has ever denied those."

"Well, why the dickens don't you write something that they will accept?
Why not make up something quite conventional?"

I looked across the hearth at him with a half amused, half ironical
smile, and said nothing. It is so hard to explain to an outsider the
involuntariness of all real talent.

This great leading characteristic is invariably but imperfectly grasped
by others.

They cannot realise it.

I was too flat in spirits and too tired in body to feel inclined to
enter then into an abstruse discussion with him, and I would have let
the matter slide.

His last remark to the ear of anyone who has genuine talent, whether
artist or author or poet, or what you please, sounds like a
sacrilegious blasphemy.

"Make up something!"

Great heavens! What an expression!

Is a writer, then, a cook, preparing a new dish? Is he a nursery maid
soothing a refractory child? Is he a woman's dressmaker taking her
mistress's orders?

Dinner was served just then, and we took our seats at the table in
silence.

I thought I should have no need to answer.

However, when the butler had deposited the soup and shut the door after
him, my father returned to the attack.

"Yes, Victor," he said in a friendly way, as if a happy solution of my
difficulties had just occurred to him, "why don't you make up something
quite orthodox and keep your own opinions out of it?"

I sighed and took half a glass of claret to fortify me. I saw I was in
for propounding my views upon genius, and I did