rocesses by which I had grown from the boy who was a mere bookworm
to the man who had all but succeeded as a novelist. It was a perfectly
natural, sober development. But in the last two years and a half I can
distinguish no order. In living through it, I have imagined from time
to time that my powers were coming to their ripest; but that was mere
delusion. Intellectually, I have fallen back. The probability is that
this wouldn't matter, if only I could live on in peace of mind; I should
recover my equilibrium, and perhaps once more understand myself. But the
due course of things is troubled by my poverty.'

He spoke in a slow, meditative way, in a monotonous voice, and without
raising his eyes from the ground.

'I can understand,' put in Jasper, 'that there may be philosophical
truth in all this. All the same, it's a great pity that you should
occupy your mind with such thoughts.'

'A pity--no! I must remain a reasoning creature. Disaster may end by
driving me out of my wits, but till then I won't abandon my heritage of
thought.'

'Let us have it out, then. You think it was a mistake to spend those
months abroad?'

'A mistake from the practical point of view. That vast broadening of my
horizon lost me the command of my literary resources. I lived in
Italy and Greece as a student, concerned especially with the old
civilisations; I read little but Greek and Latin. That brought me out of
the track I had laboriously made for myself I often thought with disgust
of the kind of work I had been doing; my novels seemed vapid stuff so
wretchedly and shallowly modern. If I had had the means, I should have
devoted myself to the life of a scholar. That, I quite believe, is my
natural life; it's only the influence of recent circumstances that has
made me a writer of novels. A man who can't journalise, yet must earn
his bread by literature, nowadays inevitably turns to fiction, as the
Elizabethan men turned to the drama. Well, but I should have got back, I
think, into the old line of work. It was my marriage that completed what
the time abroad had begun.'

He looked up suddenly, and added:

'I am speaking as if to myself. You, of course, don't misunderstand me,
and think I am accusing my wife.'

'No, I don't take you to mean that, by any means.'

'No, no; of course not. All that's wrong is my accursed want of money.
But that threatens to be such a fearful wrong, that I begin to wish I
had died before my marriage-day. Then A