Let me once more insist that this keeping up a conversation is a sign of insecurity, of want of confidence.  All those who have had real friends know that when the friendship is assured the gabble ceases.  You are not at the heart of your friend, if either of you cannot go off comfortably to sleep in the other’s presence.  Speech was given us to make known our needs, and for imprecation, expostulation, and entreaty.  This pitiful necessity we are under, upon social occasions, to say something—­however inconsequent—­is, I am assured, the very degradation of speech.

IN A LITERARY HOUSEHOLD

In the literary household of fiction and the drama, things are usually in a distressing enough condition.  The husband, as you know, has a hacking cough, and the wife a dying baby, and they write in the intervals of these cares among the litter of the breakfast things.  Occasionally a comic, but sympathetic, servant brings in an armful—­“heaped up and brimming over”—­of rejected MSS., for, in the dramatic life, it never rains but it pours.  Instead of talking about editors in a bright and vigorous fashion, as the recipients of rejections are wont, the husband groans and covers his face with his hands, and the wife, leaving the touching little story she is writing—­she posts this about 9 p.m., and it brings in a publisher and L100 or so before 10.30—­comforts him by flopping suddenly over his shoulder.  “Courage,” she says, stroking his hyacinthine locks (whereas all real literary men are more or less grey or bald).  Sometimes, as in Our Flat, comic tradesmen interrupt the course of true literature with their ignoble desire for cash payment, and sometimes, as in Our Boys, uncles come and weep at the infinite pathos of a bad breakfast egg.  But it’s always a very sordid, dusty, lump-in-your-throaty affair, and no doubt it conduces to mortality by deterring the young and impressionable from literary vices.  As for its truth, that is another matter altogether.

Yet it must not be really imagined that a literary household is just like any other.  There is the brass paper-fastener, for instance.  I have sometimes thought that Euphemia married me with an eye to these conveniences.  She has two in her grey gloves, and one (with the head inked) in her boot in the place of a button.  Others I suspect her of.  Then she fastened the lamp shade together with them, and tried one day to introduce them instead of pearl buttons as efficient anchorage for cuffs and collars.  And she made a new handle for the little drawer under the inkstand with one.  Indeed, the literary household is held together, so to speak, by paper-fasteners, and how other people get along without them we are at a loss to imagine.