"My work was, as I said, light. The firm I was with were specialists in certain machinery, and I was assistant to the London manager. I had to plan out and make estimates for various plants, and travel about the south of England getting orders and superintending erection. I can tell you it just suited me, those journeys by train. I always had my book with me, and as soon as I had been over a job, I forgot all about contracts and went back to Pater, or Gibbon or Flaubert or Emerson, whoever I happened to be reading. In the evenings I used to try and imitate what I had read. "But what could I write? What did I know? Nothing! I had never been anywhere, I had never met anybody in particular, I had never been in love. I had never waked up. I was in a sort of trance, surrounded by the traditions of the genteel professional class. Of course, in a dim way I knew that my mother expected me to be something exceptional, but I was too comfortable to make any effort. It seemed to me I was quite unconventional enough in being such a reader and in keeping clear of girls. I wonder where I would have landed, supposing I had never waked up. "My brother was going his way all this time, when all of a sudden he roused me up again. For a long time he had been earning twenty-five shillings a week and spending forty, and my mother had been making good the deficit. She had just given him a five-pound note to pay for his quarterly season-ticket on the railway. He didn't pay it. Just went on travelling to the city with the old one. Of course, a lot of people had done that trick and the Company were wise to it. My brother was caught and summoned before the Lord Mayor at the Mansion House. You can believe my mother was distressed. It wouldn't have been so bad if he had only held his tongue and let her pay the forty shillings fine and costs. No! he had to give the Lord Mayor a piece of his mind. And that made the evening papers feature the amusing incident, as they call it. "I must admit the boy made out a very good case. He told the Court his father, his brother and himself had been travelling over the line for something like sixteen years. Altogether we had paid the railways two hundred pounds in fares. 'Now,' says he to the Court, 'if I had done two hundred pounds worth of business with a firm, they wouldn't be down on me for being a day or two late with a small account of five pounds, would they? They'd be glad to accommodate me. But the railway wants to put me in prison.' Well, the Lord Mayor happened to be a shareholder in the railway, and of course he couldn't admit that at all. He fined him the regulation forty shillings and several pounds cost. But as I said, this peculiar argument of my brother's got the case into a prominent position and everybody saw it. His employers saw it and cashiered him the next morning. My uncle, who lived at Surbiton, saw it and wrote to my mother.