the result of a slow and elaborate building up;
I could look back and see the processes 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'