The literary artist plays, I had said, with such ideas as he personally finds diverting.... But at this point criticism, remote but decisive, dwelt feelingly, and with, I believe, a tinge of imaginative embellishment, upon the miseries of housekeeping in establishments wherein people never could manage to be on time for their meals. For I seemed to have written through and blotted out another entire, bright, irretrievable afternoon: and rising, prior to a brief venturing into the society of human beings, I wondered how the poetically favored simile of the life of a galley-slave could ever have occurred to, of all persons, some writer or another, as representing thralldom.... After supper I returned to the library: and there--with the artificial aid of electricity now, somehow symbolically, replacing the true sun,--I resumed the quest of my epilogue.... To the one side, as I had pointed out, the artist seeks to divert himself with the ideas which he, whether or no he absolutely and crudely "believes in them," does personally find diverting. This is the game he chooses to play: it is the game with which, at any cost, he intends to amuse himself. And considering all things, I was really afraid that when Mr. Joseph Conrad talked about the artist being prompted by "an obscure inner necessity," we overheard the resort of a pricking conscience to pleonasm. There is nothing particularly "obscure" about our general human unwillingness to be bored: and the artist evades his boredom by playing at his art. That seemed to me all there was to it. Let us excogitate, as a most pregnant example,--I said, with the pedantic touch befitting graver issues,--the famous case of Joseph Hergesheimer.... § 61 Now, in order to approach the most striking but one of all modern instances, and the case which in so many features, I believe, resembles my own case, I must recapitulate a great deal written a while back, when Joseph Hergesheimer was to me, in the main, a collection of some half a dozen books, and the hand which wrote them had shaken my hand not more than half a dozen times. Since then we have become--within the limits of such confidence as remains possible and wary between creative writers,--rather intimate.... But I am speaking of a time before this intimacy, and of my very first impressions of Mr. Hergesheimer as these impressions were derived from his books alone. At that time so said they, spoke they, and told they the tale, in "literary gossip," that Joseph Hergesheimer "wrote" for a long while before an iota of his typing was transmuted into proof sheets. And the tale told how for fourteen years he could find nowhere any magazine editor to whose present needs a Hergesheimer story was quite suited. It was then, and to-day remains, my belief that, in approaching Mr. Hergesheimer's writings, one should bear constantly in mind those fourteen years, for to me they appear, not uncuriously, to have shaped and colored every book he has ever published.