I pricked up my ears. I saw the promise of getting him to talk about himself. And I can listen to anything a man has to tell me of his own history; it is only men’s opinions that I find so boring. Why will people have opinions? “And overstrained your memory?” I asked. He shook his head and pursed his mouth. “It wasn’t that that ruined my prospects,” he said. “No?” I commented, as provocatively as I could. He leaned a little forward and frowned with an effect of thoughtful concentration as he said, “You see, in some ways I’ve got too good a memory; the trouble with me is that I can’t remember what I’ve remembered.” I raised my eyebrows interrogatively. I could see that he was warm, now, with the craving to confess himself. “You aren’t a writer, yourself, by any chance?” he asked. “I’ve done a certain amount,” I admitted. “Thought you had rather that look,” he said; and went on quickly as if he were afraid that I might, in the circumstances, be tempted to detail my own achievements; “and that being so, my case might interest you, professionally, as you might say.” “It certainly would, if you care to....” I began, but I saw that he was not listening. Those queer-looking eyes of his had taken on the expression of one who is engaged in some immense effort of memory. “As a young man,” he said--I guessed him to be, then, about thirty-five--“I had a great ambition to become a writer; but although my mind was full of ideas, I had no gift for putting them into language. At first, I tried in the ordinary way, just as all beginners do, to write stories for the magazines; but they none of them got accepted. Which wasn’t to be wondered at. I knew myself how bad they were, and I used to console myself a little with that knowledge. I may have read somewhere that so long as you kept a cool head about your own writing, there was hope for you. “Anyway, I left off writing for a time--I wasn’t twenty then--and took to studying. I read all the best authors--carefully, trying to see how the thing was done. I had a lot of spare time one way and another, and in the next five years I got through a wonderful lot of reading. I didn’t confine myself to English authors, either; I read a heap of translations from Russian, French, and German. And all that time I never once tried to write again, myself. I was just getting to learn my trade, I thought. “Then I lost my job in the city, and while I was looking about for another one I had another shot at writing a magazine story. Well, it was certainly the nearest I’d got up to then of being the right thing. It was a lot better written than any of my other shots, but the plot was too weak. And I found that in learning to write I had lost all my ideas. I’d forgotten all the old ones, and no new ones came to me. At least, not at first.”