hen I sat down to write. But now I see him approaching me between the
beds, and before I can pass him, as I want to, he button-holes me and
proceeds to explain that Tomkins never would have died if he had
undergone an operation that the doctor had perceived from the very
first moment was necessary. After a long talk with him, perhaps, my pen
stops. I pause: and when I pause I know the inspiration has gone. As
the ancients would say, the Muse or the God has departed and dictates
no more. I fling aside the paper and look at my watch. Several hours
passed in the hospital, but I'll go round to the club now. And I go. I
know Tomkins is dead. It only occurs to me afterwards, as a secondary
consideration, that in consequence the MS. is finished. Tomkins was not
for the manuscript, but the manuscript for Tomkins. Now the point
is--Can I be held responsible for that scene? It is not my fault that I
have mentally seen a private soldier dying in hospital. The whole thing
was involuntary."

"Very extraordinary views!" muttered my father.

I shrugged my shoulders in silence, and called up Nous to give him my
untouched dinner.

"The best joke of it is, too," I said, suspending a strip of sirloin
over the collie's nose, "the publishers admit if I had less talent they
would print my things. I could not understand why my 'Laura Dean' was
refused, so I went down to the publishers to try and find out. I saw
the reader himself, and an awfully nice fellow he is, too. In reply to
my question, he said the objection to the book was that it dealt with a
wife leaving her husband. I stared at him in amazement. 'But, great
Scott!' I said, 'that's a good old-fashioned theme enough. It's as old
as the hills. It's the subject of--' and I gave him a list of about a
dozen eminent novels. 'Yes,' he admitted. 'But they are not written in
the same way.' 'Is there anything coarse or low in the writing?' 'Oh,
no! I should not say that!' 'Well, what is the matter with it, then?'
'The thing is too much brought before you. Of course, in these books
you have mentioned the wife runs away, but it does not make much
impression. You have put it all so forcibly, and given the characters
and episode so much life, and driven the idea of her infidelity so far
home to one, that, well, it becomes a different thing--one realises
it.' 'Oh, then you admit the immoral theme and the language to be
unobjectionable, and the book would have been accepted by the British
public