And then comes what is the saddest experience of all; it will pass into the hands of friends and readers; echoes of it will come back to me, in talk and print; but it will no longer be the book I knew and loved, only a part of my past.  And this is the hardest thing of all for a writer, that when others read one’s book they take it for the flash of a present mood, while the writer of it will only see in it a pale reflection of a time long past, and will feel perhaps even farther away from his book than those who criticise it, however severely.  If my book is criticised as I write it, or directly after I have written it, it is as though I were myself maltreated; but when it appears so belatedly, I am often the harshest critic of all, because my whole point of view may perhaps have shifted, and I may be no longer the man who wrote the book, but a man of larger experience, who can judge perhaps more securely than any one else how far behind life the book lags.  There is no season in the world in which the mind travels faster from its standpoint than when it has finished a book, because during all the writing of it one has kept, as it were, tensely and constrainedly at a certain point; and so when freedom comes, the thought leaps hurriedly forward, like a weight lifted by an elastic cord that has been stretched almost to breaking.  “Can I ever have thought or felt so?” the mind says to itself, scanning the pages; and thus a book, which is mistaken for the very soul of a man, is often no more like the man himself than a dusty, sunburnt picture that represents what he was long years before.

But to-day my only thought is that the little companion whom I loved so well, who has walked and sate, eaten and drunk, gone in and out with me, silent and smiling, has left me and departed to try his fortune in the rough world.  How will he fare? how will he be greeted?  And yet I know that when he returns to me, saying, “I am a part of yourself,” I shall be apt to deny it.  For whereas now, if my child is lame, or feeble or pitiful or blind, I love him the better that he is not strong and active; when he returns I shall have a clear eye for his faults and weaknesses, and shall wish him other than he will be.

Sometimes I have talked with the writers of books, and they have told me of the misery and agony that the composition of a book has brought them.  They speak of hot and cold fits; of times when they write fiercely and eagerly, and of times when they cannot set down a line to their mind; days of despair when they hate and despise the book; days when they cannot satisfy themselves about a single word:  all this is utterly unknown to me; once embarked upon a book, I have neither hesitation nor fear.  To sit down to it, day after day, and to write, is like sitting down to talk with one’s nearest friend, where no concealment or diplomacy is necessary, but where one can say exactly what comes into the mind, with no fear of being misunderstood.  I have not the