In this sense I used to feel that there was a striking contrast between the man and his writing. Personally, and as a talker, it was the carelessness of his attack of any subject that first impressed me. His interest seemed wholly centred and absorbed by the incident, the character, or the episode under discussion, and the means by which his thought and feeling concerning it might be expressed, were by contrast almost negligently employed. As a writer, great as is the rank he deservedly holds in the region of romance, his work yields to me exactly the opposite impression. His own faith in the story he has to tell is never, to my thinking, entirely convincing. Something too much of the conscious artist intrudes itself between the narrator and the reader, something that robs the result of the sense that the recorded fact is a fact indeed. It is impossible to forget, I think, even in Stevenson’s happiest work that he is an accomplished man of letters; and although there is no great writer who is not, the greatest and ablest allow us to forget it. Certainly in contact with Stevenson the man, one had no temptation to remember it. One was never haunted in those delightful hours of social intercourse by the suspicion that he was searching for a phrase, and yet often enough our conversation turned upon points of style; and I remember once in a selected line of a poet, where the fitness of a single word was under discussion, Stevenson swiftly checked our condemnation by a remark that seemed all the more apt because it came from his lips: “My dear Carr, every word looks guilty when it is put into the dock.” I suppose no one ever had a juster or more generous appreciation of the great leisurely genius of Sir Walter Scott than was possessed by Stevenson. No one by intention or design was more desirous to exclude from his own work the sense of modishness in style, and yet it remains with me as a final impression of Stevenson as a writer, that he occasionally laid himself open to the reproach that he would, as a critic, have been the first to detect in the work of another. But I can think of him now only as I knew him then, an unconquerable boy with his heart set for adventure, lending to our talk as often as he came into it something of that daring outlook into worlds as yet undiscovered which characterised the adventurers of the seventeenth century.