successful.”  I apologised very humbly, and explained the circumstances.  “Oh, please don’t blame yourself in any way,” he said, “I have not the least shadow of resentment in my mind about it.  There is something wrong about my work; it doesn’t interest people.  I suppose it is that I can’t let myself go.”  An interesting conversation followed, and he told me more than he ever told me before or since about himself.  He confessed to being so critical of his own work, that his table-drawers were full of unfinished MSS.  His usual experience was to begin a piece of work enthusiastically; to plan it all out, and to work at first with zest.  “Then it begins to get all out of shape,” he said, “there is no go about it; it all loses itself in subtleties and complexities of motive; one thing trips up another, and at last it all gets so tangled that I put it aside; if I could follow the track of one strong and definite emotion, it would be all right—­but I am like the man in the story who changes the cow for the horse, and the horse for the pig, and the pig for the grindstone; and then the grindstone rolls into the river.”  He seemed to take it all very philosophically, and I ventured to say so.  “Yes,” he said, “I have learnt at last that that is how I am made; but I have been through a good many agonies of disgust and discouragement about it in old days—­it is the same with everything I have touched.  The bits of work that I have completed have all been done in a rush—­if the mood lasts long enough, I am all right—­and once or twice it has just lasted.  I am like a swimmer,” he went on, “who can only swim a certain distance; and if I judge the distance rightly, I can reach the point I desire to reach; but I generally judge the distance wrong; and half-way across I am seized with a sudden fright, and struggle back in terror.”

By one of the strange coincidences that sometimes happen in this world, I took an unknown lady in to dinner a few days afterwards, and happened to mention Willett’s name.  “Do you know him?” she said.  “Oh yes, of course you do!” she went on; “you are the Mr. S——­ of whom he has spoken to me.”  I found that my neighbour was a distant relation of Willett’s, and she told me a good deal about him.  He was absolutely alone in the world; he had been left an orphan at an early age, and had spent his holidays with guardians and relations, with any one who would take pity on him.  “He was a clever kind of boy,” she said, “melancholy and diffident, always thinking that people disliked him.  He used to give me the air of a person who was trying to find something, and who did not quite know where to look for it.  He had a time of expansion at Oxford, where he made friends and did well; and then he came to London, and began to write.  But the real tragedy of his life is this,” she said.  “He really fell in love, or as nearly as he could, with a very pretty and high-spirited girl, who took a great fancy to him, and pitied him from the bottom of her heart.  For five years the thing