Though these efforts of mine brought me very little money, they attracted
not a little attention, and I made friends. I was looked upon as a
promising young writer and, I think I may say it without vanity, was
accepted as a member of the intelligentsia, an honourable condition
which, some years later, when I became a popular writer of light
comedies, I lost; and have never since regained. I was invited to
literary parties and to parties given by women of rank and fashion who
thought it behoved them to patronise the arts. An unattached and fairly
presentable young man is always in demand. I lunched out and dined out.
Since I could not afford to take cabs, when I dined out, in tails and a
white tie, as was then the custom, I went and came back by bus. I was
asked to spend week-ends in the country. They were something of a trial
on account of the tips you had to give to the butler and to the footman
who brought you your morning tea. He unpacked your gladstone bag, and
you were uneasily aware that your well-worn pyjamas and modest toilet
articles had made an unfavourable impression upon him. For all that, I
found life pleasant and I enjoyed myself. There seemed no reason why I
should not go on indefinitely in the same way, bringing out a novel once
a year (which seldom earned more than the small advance the publisher
had given me but which was on the whole respectably reviewed), going to
more and more parties, making more and more friends. It was all very
nice, but I couldn't see that it was leading me anywhere. I was thirty.
I was in a rut. I felt I must get out of it. It did not take me long to
make up my mind. I told the friend with whom I shared the flat that I
wanted to be rid of it and go abroad. He could not keep it by himself,
but we luckily found a middle-aged gentleman who wished to install his
mistress in it, and was prepared to take it off our hands. We sold the
furniture for what it could fetch, and within a month I was on my way to
Paris. I took a room in a cheap hotel on the Left Bank.

A few months before this, I had been fortunate enough to make friends
with a young painter who had a studio in the Rue Campagne Premiere. His
name was Gerald Kelly. He had had an upbringing unusual for a painter,
for he had been to Eton and to Cambridge. He was highly talented,
abundantly loquacious, and immensely enthusiastic. It was he who first
made me acquainted with the Impressionists, whose pictures had recently
been