“Well, when we are young we expect all things to come to us. We don’t want them just to-day, but to-morrow?--we’ll whistle and down they will come from the sky. That’s what we think. In my case, however, they haven’t come. Ergo, I have lived disgracefully. Now I must begin to die gracefully by turning to work. Yet isn’t it possible to look upon the grotesque preoccupation of the American male as a trade, a form of artisan-ship, a deed of the left hand? I know a man who sells advertising, and who has more confidence in me than I should dare to have in myself. He is decent enough to think that I can supply what he wants. Why not try it?” “Aren’t you writing anything nowadays, Miles?” “Nothing,” he said, with a shrug. “Book reviews! What are book reviews? Every time I have to go to see an editor and ask for a book, it makes me feel as though selling hairpins from house to house is more respectable. Besides, the literary world has forgotten me. I only fill up space.” “Nonsense,” said she vehemently. “And you’re wrong about business. Business is pretty awful. I suppose you’ll have to find that out for yourself.” “There _are_ more delightful occupations, true. I have always had an ambition to be a cab-driver. It is the sole profession in which one becomes a licensed eavesdropper. Excellent for the literary man. You know people mind the cabby no more than if he were the horse. I mean a horse-cab, of course ... only in such leisurely vehicles do people expose their souls, their most intimate secrets. But I haven’t the cabby’s training. From things you have said, I fancied you knew horses.” “A little. When I was a young girl I had some playmates who owned them.” “Noble beasts. I’m sure they would break the neck of any poor fool who had condescended to Pegasus.” “The trouble with you, Miles, is that you don’t condescend often enough, nor persistently enough. You ought to be writing poems at this moment. You should have been doing it these last five years.” “The impulse to creation begins with a peculiar tickling of the tummy that I haven’t felt for ages.” Her eagerness to start him writing usually came to nothing in some such joke. At other times he would grow more serious.