The title was always a matter for head-racking when the book was finished; he had never yet chosen it before beginning.
For a week he got on at the desired rate; then came once more the crisis he had anticipated.
A familiar symptom of the malady which falls upon outwearied imagination.

There were floating in his mind five or six possible subjects for a book, all dating back to the time when he first began novel-writing, when ideas came freshly to him.

If he grasped desperately at one of these, and did his best to develop it, for a day or two he could almost content himself; characters, situations, lines of motive, were laboriously schemed, and he felt ready to begin writing.

But scarcely had he done a chapter or two when all the structure fell into flatness.

He had made a mistake.