of mine still puts in a plea for originality, is in the region of its conscious plan. Bad or good (it was undoubtedly bad) it introduced a certain novelty into novel-writing which had “quite a little vogue” for a time. The main character, that is to say, was made, in her infinitesimal manner, to draw herself. In staged and acted drama even, that principle--bad or good--is never consistently maintained, because other people habitually discuss the hero and heroine, and the audience’s conception of them is based on comment as well as on self-spoken revelation. Also in drama there is bound to be some sort of plot, in which action reveals the actor. But in this story which I scribbled at for a few weeks, there was no sort of plot: there was merely a clash of minor personalities breaking themselves to bits against the central gabbling figure. Hideously crude, blatantly inefficient as the execution was, there was just that one new and feasible idea in the manner of it. What I aimed at was a type that revealed itself in an individual by oceans of nonsensical speech. I wrote with the breathless speed of creation (however minute such creation was), almost entirely, but not quite, for my own private amusement. It was not quite for that internal satisfaction alone, because as I scampered and scamped, I began to contemplate a book arising out of these scribblings, a marketable book, that is to say, between covers and for sale. Eventually, for the information of any who happen to remember the total result, I got as far as the lamentable death of Dodo’s first husband, and that, as far as I knew then, was the end of the story. Dodo would be thus left a far from disconsolate widow dangling in the air like a blind-string in front of an open window. On the last page of the book, she would remain precisely as she had been on the first; she had not developed, she had not gone upwards or downwards in any moral course; she was a moment, a detail, a flashlight photograph flared on to a plate without the smallest presentment of anything, except what she happened to be at that moment. All this I did not then realize.... There it was anyhow, and having finished it, I bundled the whole affair into a drawer, and with that off my mind, concentrated again over the _Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens_.