“Splendid! splendid!” says Grant Richards; “now, you’ll let me have that in time for the spring, won’t you?” He stands with his back to the fireplace, adjusts his monocle, and begins to tell you of the artist who will design the wrapper, of the cloth in which it will be bound, of the type in which it will be printed, of the special instructions he will give his travellers. You leave his study feeling that your book is finished; that in a few days it will be presented to an enraptured world. Your imagination is already carrying you to your club and opening newspaper after newspaper over which you bow before a volley of critical applause. You discover through fuddled channels of mental mathematics the extent of the fortune that is to be yours, and, on the strength of it, you proceed to order two new suits of clothes. Then you go home, and you accept an invitation to a party, and you play football, and you review a book, and you read a few manuscripts at your office, and you turn into a short story an anecdote you overheard at your club; and in six months’ time you find your novel where you left it, your tailor’s bill in front of you, and your royalties account crippled by a process of diminishing returns. Regretfully I replaced the letter in its bright green envelope. There were still a few coals glowing in my study grate; the room was warm and kindly and sympathetic. The sky-blue walls with the deep black line running round the door and beneath the ceiling, the long low tier of bookshelves which had wooed me so often from my work, the black framed etchings of Nevinson and Wadsworth, the two water colours by Prout, the patterned tiling of the fireplace, and that dazzling screen by Roger Fry which I had bought at the Omega workshop sale with such thrilled misgiving and which has since taken its place so unobtrusively against a background of many coloured volumes; every book and ornament and picture in the room where I had wasted so many hours seemed to welcome me with a smile of affectionate indulgence. “It does not matter,” they seemed to say. “You have been very happy among us--all those hours passing from one book to another, from one chain of memories to another. You have idled away, doubtless, a deal of time in our company, but it was so that we would have you be, and for all we know you may be the richer for that idleness, richer than if you had pursued, as you had intended, with eyes riveted on the green baize of your desk, the fortunes of your really rather dismal heroine!” Our study, because it is an expression of ourself, our taste, our personality, becomes at times as reassuring, as persuasive, as that rascally confidante of introspection--a friend whom we can persuade to view our failings through our own eyes and in terms of our own conscience.