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 his study every night, and was supposed by an admiring and almost
timorous household to be producing masterpieces, when in reality he
was conducting a series of barren skirmishes between the critical
and the creative elements of his nature. He would write a chapter or
two in a fine fury of composition, and then would read what he had
written with intense disgust. He felt that his second book ought to
be better than his first, and he doubted whether he would even be
able to write anything half so good.
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