fe, who had thought it an excellent joke that her husband
should have written a book, had to take him seriously as an author
when she found that their social position was steadily improving.
With feminine tact she gave him a fountain-pen on his birthday, from
which he was meant to conclude that she believed in his mission as an
artist.

Meanwhile, with the world at his feet, the author spent an
appreciable part of his time in visiting the second-hand bookshops
and buying copies of his book absurdly cheap. He carried these waifs
home and stored them in an attic secretly, for he would have found it
hard to explain his motives to the intellectually childless. In the
first flush of authorship he had sent a number of presentation copies
of his book to writers whom he admired, and he noticed without
bitterness that some of these volumes with their neatly turned
inscriptions were coming back to him through this channel. At all the
second-hand bookshops he saw long-haired young men looking over the
books without buying them, and he thought these must be authors, but
he was too shy to speak to them, though he had a great longing to
know other writers. He wanted to ask them questions concerning their
methods of work, for he was having trouble with his second book. He
had read an article in which the writer said that the great fault of
modern fiction was that authors were more concerned to produce good
chapters than to produce good books. It seemed to him that in his
first book he had only aimed at good sentences, but he knew no one
with whom he could discuss such matters.

One day he found a copy of "The Improbable Marquis" in the Charing
Cross Road, and was glancing through it with absent-minded interest,
when a voice at his elbow said, "I shouldn't buy that if I were you,
sir. It's no good!" He looked up and saw a wild young man, with
bright eyes and an untidy black beard. "But it's mine; I wrote it,"
cried the author. The young man stared at him in dismay. "I'm sorry;
I didn't know," he blurted out, and faded away into the crowd. The
author gazed after him wistfully, regretting that he had not had
presence of mind enough to ask him to lunch. Perhaps the young man
could have told him how he ought to write his second book.

For somehow or other, at the very moment when his literary position
seemed most secure in the eyes of his wife and his friends, the
author had lost all confidence in his own powers. He shut himself up
in