Conrad returned to his hotel not wholly dissatisfied with the impression he had made upon the poet. In la Rue du Haut-Pavé he had one or two vigorous thoughts concerning the vanity of versification which he wished had occurred to him in the cabaret, and when he had lit the lamp he began to write. You can know very little about him if you are surprised to be told that what he wrote was verse. It was of course a monody to his Boyhood. As his age has not been stated, and he had begun to deplore it so much, it may be as well at this point to say that he was thirty-seven. A less venerable figure than you have pictured him, perhaps, despite the chambermaid. There were, however, hours when he felt a hundred. He felt a hundred towards the close of his stay in Paris. He had resolved to go back to London, but it had few associations for him, and he packed his portmanteaux drearily. On the evening before he crossed, his thoughts flashed to a little English watering-place where he had spent a summer when he was still proud of wearing trousers. He recalled the moment of his invitation, the thrill of its unexpectedness. A nursery, and four children: three of them his cousins, departing for the seaside next day, in fancy already on the sands. And one of the trio had exclaimed--was it Ted who began it?--one of the trio had exclaimed: "Wouldn't it be jolly if Con could come too?" He was "Con." He was Con hanging over the banisters breathless five minutes later, for Nina, and 'Gina, and Ted had descended to the drawing-room tumultuously to prefer a petition to "Ma." "Ma says there wouldn't be beds enough," they announced with long faces, mounting the stairs; and then he stammered that he had "expected there'd be something like that," and they danced round him in a ring, crying: "We made it up. You're to come with us if you may--you're to go home and ask." The nursery was very clear to him. He saw the gleeful group on the threshold again, and the bright pattern of the wall-paper. He could see the open window with the radiant sky across the roofs.