After dinner we play chess--he is a first-rate player.

At ten I help him to bed; from eleven to twelve I smoke and study Socialism and all the rest of it that Lynwood is at present floundering in." "Why don't you write, then ?" "I tried it, but it didn't answer.

I couldn't sleep after it, and was, in fact, too tired; seems absurd to be tired after such a day as that, but somehow it takes it out of one more than the hardest reading; I don't know why." "Why," I said angrily, "it's because it is work to which you are quite unsuited--work for a thick-skinned, hard-hearted, uncultivated and well-paid attendant, not for the novelist who is to be the chief light of our generation." He laughed at this estimate of his powers.
"Novelists, like other cattle, have to obey their owner," he said lightly.
I thought for a moment that he meant the Major, and was breaking into an angry remonstrance, when I saw that he meant something quite different.
It was always his strongest point, this extraordinary consciousness of right, this unwavering belief that he had to do and therefore could do certain things.

Without this, I know that he never wrote a line, and in my heart I believe this was the cause of his success.
"Then you are not writing at all ?" I asked.
"Yes, I write generally for a couple of hours before breakfast," he said.
And that evening we sat by his gas stove and he read me the next four chapters of 'Lynwood.' He had rather a dismal lodging-house bedroom, with faded wall-paper and a prosaic snuff-coloured carpet.

On a rickety table in the window was his desk, and a portfolio full of blue foolscap, but he had done what he could to make the place habitable; his Oxford pictures were on the walls--Hoffman's 'Christ speaking to the Woman taken in Adultery,' hanging over the mantelpiece--it had always been a favourite of his.