Sudden revelations of the profane world must have come now and then to hermits in their cells, to the cloistered monks of Middle Ages, to lonely sages, men of science, reformers; the revelations of the world’s superficial judgment, shocking to the souls concentrated upon their own bitter labour in the cause of sanctity, or of knowledge, or of temperance, let us say, or of art, if only the art of cracking jokes or playing the flute.  And thus this general’s daughter came to me—­or I should say one of the general’s daughters did.  There were three of these bachelor ladies, of nicely graduated ages, who held a neighbouring farmhouse in a united and more or less military occupation.  The eldest warred against the decay of manners in the village children, and executed frontal attacks upon the village mothers for the conquest of curtseys.  It sounds futile, but it was really a war for an idea.  The second skirmished and scouted all over the country; and it was that one who pushed a reconnaissance right to my very table—­I mean the one who wore stand-up collars.  She was really calling upon my wife in the soft spirit of afternoon friendliness, but with her usual martial determination.  She marched into my room swinging her stick . . . but no—­I mustn’t exaggerate.  It is not my speciality.  I am not a humoristic writer.  In all soberness, then, all I am certain of is that she had a stick to swing.

No ditch or wall encompassed my abode.  The window was open; the door too stood open to that best friend of my work, the warm, still sunshine of the wide fields.  They lay around me infinitely helpful, but truth to say I had not known for weeks whether the sun shone upon the earth and whether the stars above still moved on their appointed courses.  I was just then giving up some days of my allotted span to the last chapters of the novel “Nostromo,” a tale of an imaginary (but true) seaboard, which is still mentioned now and again, and indeed kindly, sometimes in connection with the word “failure” and sometimes in conjunction with the word “astonishing.”  I have no opinion on this discrepancy.  It’s the sort of difference that can never be settled.  All I know is that, for twenty months, neglecting the common joys of life that fall to the lot of the humblest on this earth, I had, like the prophet of old, “wrestled with the Lord” for my creation, for the headlands of the coast, for the darkness of the Placid Gulf, the light on the snows, the clouds on the sky, and for the breath of life that had to be blown into the shapes of men and women, of Latin and Saxon, of Jew and Gentile.  These are, perhaps, strong words, but it is difficult to characterise otherwise the intimacy and the strain of a creative effort in which mind and will and conscience are engaged to the full, hour after hour, day after day, away from the world, and to the exclusion of all that makes life really lovable and gentle—­something for which a material parallel can only be found in the