Youth means nothing to us when we are young. It is gold that we spend freely. We push past it towards the future. To-day is as indifferent to us as yesterday. We set out to write a book and we do not find out till we have finished it what we meant to say. We have lost interest in our book long before we have corrected the final proof. We are at work already on some new thing. We hardly pause to read the reviews of the book that we handed to our publisher with such excitement six months earlier. What does it matter what they say about that book. We have got beyond it. It is a part of our dead self. We are living in to-morrow. People come up and say: “We like your last book,” or “We don’t think that your heroine would have fallen in love with that sort of man,” or, “Do you think that he would really have behaved quite like that?” And we smile and we say, “Perhaps.” But we are thinking of the new story that is shaping itself in our brain, the new story for which we have already prepared a series of brand-new note-books. I am always surprised when I find a writer of under forty genuinely depressed by his reviews. Surely he must know, I think, that all this is only his apprenticeship, that he is learning how to write, and that a generous public is financing his education. He has not begun yet. And this book of which I am now writing the last pages: I have come down to the Albany, at Hastings, for a week to finish it. For five days I have scarcely spoken to a soul except to the waiter and the girl who brings me my shaving water and prepares my bath for me in the morning. I have shut myself up in my room all day, writing. I have enjoyed the writing of it more, I think, than that of any of my other books. But already, even before it is finished, it has begun to become a parcel of the past. Already I am living in to-morrow. I am thinking of the relief I shall feel on Saturday as I catch the 8.30 for Charing Cross: I am playing football against the Exiles. There will be nothing on my mind as there was last week to mar the enjoyment of the match. I shall not afterwards have to rush away to catch an early train. I shall go with the rest of the team to de Hem’s, and we shall dance our dance in Dansey Yard, and we shall toast our victory in pints of lukewarm ale, and by eleven o’clock we shall feel the world to be a very companionable spot. And on Monday morning I shall go back to the office, and at about eleven Douglas Goldring will drop in with the latest 1917 club scandal, and an enquiry about the sales of his new novel; but I shall be for once indifferent to 1917 club scandal. I shall tell him that since he saw me last I have written 20,000 words, and that for another month I do not propose to put pen to paper, and we shall discuss with what wines we are to heighten our enjoyment on Friday of _Polly_ at the Kingsway. And in the evening, as I walk homewards up the North End Road, I shall notice