 aunt dismissed the matter with a heavy sigh, and smoothed her dress.
    »There, my dear!« she said. »Now, you know the beginning, middle, and end,
and all about it. We won't mention the subject to one another any more; neither,
of course, will you mention it to anybody else. This is my grumpy, frumpy story,
and we'll keep it to ourselves, Trot!«
 

                                 Chapter XLVIII

                                   Domestic.

I laboured hard at my book, without allowing it to interfere with the punctual
discharge of my newspaper duties; and it came out and was very successful. I was
not stunned by the praise which sounded in my ears, notwithstanding that I was
keenly alive to it, and thought better of my own performance, I have little
doubt, than anybody else did. It has always been in my observation of human
nature, that a man who has any good reason to believe in himself never
flourishes himself before the faces of other people in order that they may
believe in him. For this reason, I retained my modesty in very self-respect; and
the more praise I got, the more I tried to deserve.
    It is not my purpose, in this record, though in all other essentials it is
my written memory, to pursue the history of my own fictions. They express
themselves, and I leave them to themselves. When I refer to them, incidentally,
it is only as a part of my progress.
    Having some foundation for believing, by this time, that nature and accident
had made me an author, I pursued my vocation with confidence. Without such
assurance I should certainly have left it alone, and bestowed my energy on some
other endeavour. I should have tried to find out what nature and accident really
had made me, and to be that, and nothing else.
    I had been writing, in the newspaper and elsewhere, so prosperously, that
when my new success was achieved, I considered myself reasonably entitled to
escape from the dreary debates. One joyful night, therefore, I noted down the
music of the parliamentary bagpipes for the last time, and I have never heard it
since; though I still recognise the old drone in the newspapers, without any
substantial variation (except, perhaps, that there is more of it) all the
livelong session.
    I now write of the time when I had been married, I suppose, about a year and
a half. After several varieties of experiment, we had given up the housekeeping
as a bad job. The house kept itself,
