Often enough, indeed, a man’s love-life is a spectacle to the novelist for melancholy contemplation. In the years that should overbrim with kisses, he has neither the money nor the leisure for much love-making. He is economically and temporally dependent. He indulges in occasional flirtations that he dare not pursue, believing it unfair to make love to a decent girl if he is not in a position to propose marriage to her. Occasionally he buys pleasure in some fourth-floor flat in Piccadilly and feels rather “a dog” about it. He marries when he is thirty-four, and the next three years are the most vital, the most personal he will ever know. Rapture passes; and having once drunken, he would drink again. He begins to sow his wild oats; wild oats must be sown at some time in a man’s life, and the casual bartering of sensation is of no significance. But by the time a man is thirty-seven he knows too much and has seen too much to become the light-hearted philanderer he might have been in the earlier twenties. A woman writer--I think it was Rebecca West--wrote somewhere something to the effect that it was not the bad man, not the philanderer against whom a young girl should be warned. The Jurgens and Casanovas and Macheaths have received so much happiness from women that they repay happiness with happiness. They are the sun that shines and leaves, after its setting, a sense of gratitude. It is against the spiteful man, against the man who has been unsuccessful with women that a young girl should be protected. That is the man who will be unkind to her. And I think it is a bad thing when a man on the verge of middle-age sets out deliberately to sow wild oats. He will be taking revenge somewhere for his starved boyhood. The chance to make the most of the years best worth having is the greatest offer that the world makes to the young artist whom it would turn into an entertainer. But, even so, I doubt whether this bribe would overcome the instinct of preservation that cautions us to play for safety, were there not that other, that more powerful inducement, the love of one’s work for its own sake. About a year ago there was a symposium in _The Strand_ in which a number of novelists were invited to name that book of theirs of which they had most enjoyed the writing. Several writers said that they had not enjoyed writing any of them; that they had enjoyed the planning, the revision, but that the actual writing was hard and unpleasant work. I wonder. I suppose they were sincere. But I was glad to see the other day in an American paper an article by Hugh Walpole saying that he continued writing simply because he “loved it--it, telling stories.”