It was not at my own house but at Lady Leek’s that I used to meet the literary men of the period. I did not care for having them at Greylands, or even at Chiswick, because they were liable to wear such odd clothes, and to talk so very loud, and to bring the strangest people in with them, quite uninvited. But they were very interesting people to meet, there is no doubt. The trouble about their writings was that they spent almost all their time writing about one another; sometimes in appreciation, sometimes in criticism. Occasionally one of them would break away from the tradition by writing about the men of a previous generation—there was Bernard Sykes, for example, who wrote a book that was very much talked about at the time, in which he tried to show that Lord Kitchener was a bad general, and that Herbert Wells was not really religious. But mostly they stuck to their own generation and criticized each other’s works about each other. The novelists could not do this exactly, but even in the novels the heroes were always novelists and the heroines female novelists, and they all settled down in Chelsea and lived unhappily ever after. Novels were very long in those days, running to three, or four, or even five volumes. Archie Lock used to say that he always took Debrett with him when he went on a journey, because it was the only book you could still get in one volume. “And very creditable to them,” he added, “considering the pressure on their space.” Of course the old “adventure stories” had not quite died out, but they were dying out rapidly—the Tarzan Syndicate, for example, decided to confine itself to films about this time. Publishing was already so expensive that all books except technical ones had to be produced by subscription. So the only novels one had were very long and very literary. It was only Jenkins’ invention in the seventies that made them cheap again.