An event, however, called me suddenly home.

Politics and journalism knocked literature sky high, and the novel--it was entitled "One Story's Good Till Another Is Told"-- was laid by and quite forgotten.

Some twenty years later, at a moment when I was being lashed from one end of the line to the other, my wife said: "Let us drop the nasty politics and get back to literature." She had preserved the old manuscript, two thousand pages of it.
"Fetch it," I said.
She brought it with effulgent pride.

Heavens! The stuff it was! Not a gleam, never a radiance.

I had been teaching myself to write--I had been writing for the English market--perpendicular! The Lord has surely been good to me.