“I came back to town yesterday – and I see my little subject comparatively clear – I think. My hero's altar has long been a ‘spiritual’ one – lighted in the gloom of his own soul. Then it becomes a material one, and the event is determined in a manner that the story relates.”

“I broke off there – but I wrote the greater part of a very short tale on those lines: with the effect, unusual for me, of quite losing conceit of my subject, within sight of the close, and asking myself if it is worth going on with: or rather feeling that it isn't. I shall put it by – perhaps it will, the humour of it, come back to me. But the thing is a ‘conceit,’ after all, a little fancy which doesn't hold a great deal. Such things betray one – that I more and more (if possible) feel. Plus je vais, the more intensely it comes home to me that solidity of subject, importance, emotional capacity of subject, is the only thing on which, henceforth, it is of the slightest use for me to expend myself. Everything else breaks down, collapses, turns thin, turns poor, turns wretched – betrays one miserably.”