ot for that, this thing had gone to the scoffing
of some publisher's reader, and another had known my shame.) And I shall
not write another pose novel.

I am inclined to think these pose novels the wild oats of authorship. We
sit down in the heyday of our youth to write the masterpiece.
Obviously, it must be a novel about a man and a woman, and something as
splendid as we can conceive of in that way. We look about us. We do not
go far for perfection. One of the brace holds the pen and the other is
inside his or her head; and so Off! to the willing pen. Only a few years
ago we went slashing among the poppies with a walking-stick, and were,
we said boldly and openly, Harolds and Hectors slaying our thousands.
Now of course we are grown up to self-respect, and must needs be a
little disingenuous about it. But as the story unfolds there is no
mistaking the likeness, in spite of the transfiguration. This bold,
decided man who performs such deeds of derring-do in the noisome slum,
knocks down the burly wife-beater, rescues an unmistakable Miss Clapton
from the knife of a Lascar, and is all the while cultivating a virtuous
consumption that stretches him on an edifying, pathetic, and altogether
beautiful deathbed in the last chapter----My dear Authorling, cry my
friends, we hear the squeak of that little voice of yours in every word
he utters. Is _that_ what you aspire to be, that twopence-coloured
edition of yourself? Heaven defend you from your desires!

Yet there was a singular fascination in writing the book; to be in
anticipation my own sympathetic historian, to joy with my joys yet to
come, and sorrow with my sorrows, to bear disaster like a man, and at
last to close my own dear eyes, and with a swelling heart write my own
epitaph. The pleasure remained with me until I reached the end. How
admirably I strutted in front of myself! And I and the better self of me
that was flourishing about in the book--we pretended not to know each
other for what we were. He was myself with a wig and a sham visiting
card, and I owed it to myself to respect my disguise. I made him with
very red hair--my hair is fairly dark--and shifted his university from
London to Cambridge. Clearly it could not be the same person, I argued.
But I endowed him with all the treasures of myself; I made him say all
the good things I might have said had I thought of them opportunely, and
all the noble thoughts that occurred to me afterwards occurred to him
at t