The literary tradition of that time, so far as the novel was concerned, expired with du Maurier. He came near to having a style as natural as Thackeray's, and he was quite as sentimental. Before he began to write novels, he prided himself upon the fact that a store of "plots" for novels lay undeveloped in his mind. It was the offer of a "plot" to Mr. Henry James one evening when they were walking up and down the High Street, Bayswater, that resulted in du Maurier becoming a novelist. Du Maurier told him the plot of _Trilby._ "But you ought to write that story," cried James. "I can't write," he replied; "I have never written. If you like the plot so much you may take it." Mr. James said that it was too valuable a present to take, and that du Maurier must write the story himself. On reaching home that night he set to work. By the next morning he had written the first two numbers not of _Trilby_ but of _Peter Ibbetson_. "It seemed all to flow from my pen, without effort in a full stream," he said, "but I thought it must be poor stuff, and I determined to look for an omen to learn whether any success would attend this new departure. So I walked out into the garden, and the very first thing that I saw was a large wheelbarrow, and that comforted me and reassured me, for, as you will remember, there is a wheelbarrow in the first chapter of _Peter Ibbetson._"[2] _Peter Ibbetson_--"The young man, lonely, chivalrous and disquieted by a touch of genius," as the hero has been well described--was written for money, and brought its author a thousand pounds.