ing to be rid of the pest,
the novelist begins to doubt his own pestilency. He is wrong. In a way,
society knows of our existence, but does not worry; it shows this in a
curiously large number of ways, more than can be enumerated here. It
sees the novelist as a man apart; as a creature fraught with venom, and,
paradoxically, a creature of singularly lamb-like and unpractical
temperament.

Consider, indeed, the painful position of a respectable family whose
sons make for Threadneedle Street every day, its daughters for Bond
Street and fashion, or for the East End, good works, and social
advancement. Imagine that family, who enjoys a steady income, shall we
say in the neighbourhood of L5000 a year, enough to keep it in modest
comfort, confronted with the sudden infatuation of one of its daughters
for an unnamed person, met presumably in the East End where he was
collecting copy. You can imagine the conversation after dinner:--

Angeline: 'What does he do, father? Oh, well! he's a novelist.'

Father: .... What! a novelist! One of those long-haired, sloppy-collared
ragamuffins without any soles to their boots! Do you think that because
I've given you a motor-car I'm going to treat you to a husband? A bar
loafer ... (we are always intemperate) ... A man whom your mother and
sisters ... (our morals are atrocious) ... I should not wonder if the
police ... (we are all dishonest, and yet we never have any money) ... I
was talking to the Bishop ... (we practise no religion, except that
occasionally we are Mormons)....

And so on, and so on. Father won't have it, and if in the end Father
does have it he finds that Angeline's eyes are _not_ blacked, but that
Angeline's husband's boots _are_ blacked, that the wretched fellow keeps
a balance at the bank, can ride a horse, push a perambulator, drive a
nail; but he does not believe it for a long time. For it is, if not
against all experience, at any rate against all theory that a novelist
should be eligible. The bank clerk is eligible, the novelist is not; we
are not 'safe,' we are adventurers, we have theories, and sometimes the
audacity to live up to them. We are often poor, which happens to other
men, and this is always our own fault, while it is often their
misfortune. Of late years, we have grown still more respectable than our
forefathers, who were painfully such: Dickens lived comfortably in
Marylebone; Thackeray reigned in a luxurious house near Kensington
Square and in sev