He had started upon his task with the utmost hope and confidence. He had for a couple of years been studying stage work, writing plays that nobody would touch, and serving that dreary apprenticeship which comes before literary success, but which is, unhappily, not always followed by it. He had pinned above his writing-table a sentence from "Earl's Dene," which had afforded him a sombre support often enough: "The only road to the skies, Mademoiselle, is up the garret stairs. Mozart climbed them, Moretti climbed them, ... everybody who has ever done anything has had to climb them; and you, Mademoiselle, are one whose duty for the present is to starve." It may have been because he secretly felt that he had starved long enough, or from the buoyant hope pathetically natural to youth, that West was convinced that his time had come; but at least of that fact he had no doubt. When, however, he sat down to write, he found his brain teeming, in place of valuable ideas, with the single notion that this time he must succeed; instead of a plot, his mind spun visions of coming greatness; and in place of elaborating witticisms, his thoughts turned alternately to dismal memories and to yet more gloomy forebodings. To-day ended a week of futile endeavor, and the unlucky writer was forced to confess to himself that, so far from being further on in his work than he was seven days earlier, he had stuck where he set out, and acquired the fatal hindrance of a self-distrust which benumbed all his powers. It grew quickly darker as he brooded, the brief February twilight shutting down rapidly. It was so dark when at last he got heavily upon his feet that he was obliged to fumble about for his shabby hat and coat in the shallow closet which held his scant wardrobe. He muttered to himself as he did so a quotation from Octave Feuillet. He could hardly have been an aspirant for literary honors, and not be crammed to the throat with quotations. "'_Ce n'est donc pas un vain mot, la faim!_'" he said aloud, with so much bitterness that a hearer, had there been one, might have forgiven his sentimentality. "'_Il y a donc vraiment une maladie de ce nom-là._'"