Then, somehow or other, when we were in the drawing-room afterwards, the conversation grew personal. I don't mean "personal" in any unpleasant sense, but merely literally; we began to talk about ourselves. Or rather, perhaps, it was as if Mrs. Severn, Terry and I were suddenly being forced to expose our intimate lives to the full glare of Severn's arguments, while he alone remained aloof--interested but hardly perturbed. It began by his telling me what ought to be the successive stages of my advancement as a literary man. "In a few years," he said "you must have a sub-editorship--I'll see whether I can find one for you. You'll have to work like hell while you're at it, and in your spare time, if you have any, you must manage to write a novel--preferably one that will establish your reputation and bring you in not more than a hundred pounds altogether. After that you must take a flat in either Bloomsbury or Chelsea and decide whether you're going to plod along in Fleet Street, earning a middling salary and work jolly hard for it, or take to the wilder life of the professional fiction-writer, in which you may earn nothing at all or else fabulous sums.... On the whole, I think you had better become the successful novelist who is very shy and unapproachable. In that case you must write a stupid novel about Very Good People and Very Bad People, with a wedge of sex in between, and you must take care that all your most intimate private affairs are reported sensationally in the Press.... After your novel's in its second hundred thousand and your bank balance is beginning to stagger you, you must marry a society woman and arrange for your name to appear in the next birthday honours' list...."