iculty. I had had an independent
income--left me by my father who had died when I was in my second year at
Jesus--only three hundred a year, but enough for me to live upon without
working. I had gone often to the theatre in those days, and had scraped up
an acquaintance with a middle-aged actor, whose chief occupation had been
the stage-managing of new productions. With his help I had studied
stagecraft by attending rehearsals, the best possible school for a
would-be dramatist. And my first accepted play had been written in
collaboration with him. It had not been a great success, but I had gained
invaluable experience, and, after that, success had come to me rapidly and
easily. I found that I had the knack of writing pleasant little artificial
comedies. None of them had run for longer than eight months, and I had
only written five in all, but they had made me comparatively rich. At that
time my investments alone were bringing me in nearly two thousand a year.

I was thirty-two, now, and it seemed to me looking back, that I had never
had one worthy ambition in all those years. I had never even been
seriously in love. Most deplorable of all I had never looked forward to a
future that promised anything but repetitions of the same success.

What had I to live for? I saw before me a life of idleness with no decent
occupation, no objects, but the amassing of more money, the seeking of a
wider circle of acquaintances, dinner-parties at more select houses, an
increasing reputation as a deviser of workmanlike, tolerably amusing
plays. If I had had vices such as a promiscuous love of women, I might
have found the anticipation of such a future more tolerable. There might,
then, have been some incitement to new living, new experience. But I had
nothing.

Yet until that evening in the wood I had hardly paused to consider what
would presently become of me. The gradual increase in my scale of personal
luxury had brought sufficient diversion and satisfaction. I had lived in
the pleasures of the moment, and had only rarely been conscious that those
pleasures were growing stale; that the crust of life upon which I had so
diligently crawled, was everywhere and always the same.

Now it was as if that monotonous surface had amazingly split. My crawling
was paralysed and changed to a terrified stillness. I had paused,
horrified, at the mouth of a pit, and gazed down with a sick loathing at
the foundations of my life that had been so miracu