And I certainly did not regret the walk to Highgate and back, nor the two hours’ wait at Ludgate Hill for the 3.15 “paper” train. Wallace let himself go that night, and made me realise that his novel was to be the best thing for years. He told me all about it. The book was to be a complete exposition of the British national character, as portrayed in the person of his hero, Joseph Blake. Blake was to be a success; a typical member of the middle class, educated at a grammar school, entering a business career at eighteen, and Parliament at forty-five; achieving cabinet rank at fifty-four, and the Premiership at sixty-three. As a background to the central figure there were to be any number of minor characters, all, as it were, supporting and representing Blake--“the firm mass of British opinion” Wallace called it. The single exception was to be a school friend of Blake’s, a man of brilliant parts, but without social or personal ambitions, who spent his life in writing works of philosophy that nobody wanted to read. He was not poor, nor, in a sense, neglected--“we’ll get away altogether from the typical romance,” Wallace commented--but his work and life counted for nothing in popular opinion. The real climax of the book, and incidentally the very first suggestion that Blake was not a great man nor his friend (“I have thought of calling him John Rooke,” Wallace said) a failure, was reached in the last few pages, when Blake, after a prolonged illness, and patiently waiting for death, confides in Rooke that he knows, now, that such a career as his had been was wasted effort. To which Rooke replies that he had known that at school. “How much of the book have you written?” I asked Wallace just before we parted. “About 80,000 words,” he told me, “but I am not absolutely satisfied with some of the detail. What I propose to do is to finish the thing and then partly rewrite it.” He went to America on a long lecture-tour that autumn, and I did not see him again for twelve months. I sought him out, then, because McGillett made a casual reference to the magnum opus at lunch one day, and I realised that I was no longer the only recipient of Wallace’s confidence. In those days one of McGillett’s sources of income was finding books for publishers, and afterwards using what influence he had to get his discoveries well noticed in the Press; and when I found that he knew about the book, I was afraid that I might not, after all, get it for Hallows and Rice.