the novel itself, the whole conception, the way one’s seen the thing, felt about it, make it stand in relation to other things, not one in a million cares for that.  And yet I sometimes wonder whether there’s anything else in the whole world worth doing.  These other people,” he indicated the hotel, “are always wanting something they can’t get.  But there’s an extraordinary satisfaction in writing, even in the attempt to write.  What you said just now is true:  one doesn’t want to be things; one wants merely to be allowed to see them.”

Some of the satisfaction of which he spoke came into his face as he gazed out to sea.

It was Rachel’s turn now to feel depressed.  As he talked of writing he had become suddenly impersonal.  He might never care for any one; all that desire to know her and get at her, which she had felt pressing on her almost painfully, had completely vanished.

“Are you a good writer?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.  “I’m not first-rate, of course; I’m good second-rate; about as good as Thackeray, I should say.”

Rachel was amazed.  For one thing it amazed her to hear Thackeray called second-rate; and then she could not widen her point of view to believe that there could be great writers in existence at the present day, or if there were, that any one she knew could be a great writer, and his self-confidence astounded her, and he became more and more remote.

“My other novel,” Hewet continued, “is about a young man who is obsessed by an idea—­the idea of being a gentleman.  He manages to exist at Cambridge on a hundred pounds a year.  He has a coat; it was once a very good coat.  But the trousers—­they’re not so good.  Well, he goes up to London, gets into good society, owing to an early-morning adventure on the banks of the Serpentine.  He is led into telling lies—­my idea, you see, is to show the gradual corruption of the soul—­calls himself the son of some great landed proprietor in Devonshire.  Meanwhile the coat becomes older and older, and he hardly dares to wear the trousers.  Can’t you imagine the wretched man, after some splendid evening of debauchery, contemplating these garments—­hanging them over the end of the bed, arranging them now in full light, now in shade, and wondering whether they will survive him, or he will survive them?  Thoughts of suicide cross his mind.  He has a friend, too, a man who somehow subsists upon selling small birds, for which he sets traps in the fields near Uxbridge.  They’re scholars, both of them.  I know one or two wretched starving creatures like that who quote Aristotle at you over a fried herring and a pint of porter.  Fashionable life, too, I have to represent at some length, in order to show my hero under all circumstances.  Lady Theo Bingham Bingley, whose bay mare he had the good fortune to stop, is the daughter of a very fine old Tory peer.  I’m going to describe the kind of parties I once went to—­the fashionable intellectuals, you know, who like to have