Money and leisure and gratified ambition are prettily coloured toys; but they are flavour, they are decoration; there does not come from them the deep, the sustaining satisfaction of a hard task tackled and carried through. It does not matter whether one writes well or badly: there is the same joy of creation, the same pleasure in watching the blank page fill before one’s eyes, in counting up the number of words that are the outcome of a morning’s work. There is the physical sense of effort; the physical weariness to be fought against, when one’s brain is eager with ideas, but one’s wrist is stiff and tired--when one longs to drop the pen and sink into an armchair. But one doesn’t drop the pen; one goes on, and it is worth it. It is bowling up hill, against the wind, to keep the runs down while the man at the other end gets wickets. You have bowled ten overs; your legs and arms and back are tired. For sixty balls you have kept that length outside the off stump, just too short to drive, just too far up to cut. You have altered your pace a little; you have bowled first from the far end of the crease; then from close up against the wicket. Little tricks to keep him playing, to break his patience, so that he may make the fatal mistake at the other end against the man with wind and slope to help him. And you are tired. It is heart-breaking, the Fabius Cunctator game. You long to chuck the ball over to the captain, to say, “I’m tired, I can’t go on.” But you know that he cannot trust his other and better bowler to keep on at that length ball: you know that the wickets must come from the top end. You stick to it. You bowl another over and you get your second wind. There is no such thing as work without physical exhaustion, and writing is physically the most exhausting thing I know, far more exhausting than the hardest game of rugger, or the longest day in the field. It is such an emptying of oneself. I tried dictating once, but I did not like it. I got through a terrific lot of work in a very little while. But I did not like it. I missed the sight of the white page slowly turning black, of the rising pile of paper at my side, and the long struggle of the brain against the growing weariness of wrist and fingers.