"I wrote my first book when I was nineteen. One morning I just began to write, and then it was very easy. Then everything else was easy. The first publisher to whom I sent it accepted it. It was published and had quite a success. I thought I was made for life. Anything seemed possible to one. After all, so far as one's possibilities went one was on a level with any one--Shakespeare, Dante, any one you like. One might do anything... . I published a book a year, after that, for ten years--ten years ten books, and then awoke to the fact that I was nothing at all and would never be anything--that I would never write like Shakespeare, and, a matter of equal importance, would never sell like Mrs. Henry Wood. Not that I wished to write like any one else. I had a great idea of keeping to my own individuality, but I saw quite clearly that what I had in myself--all of it--was no real importance to any one. I might so well have been a butcher or baker for all that it mattered. I saw that I was one of those unfortunate people--there are many of them--just in between the artists and the shopkeepers. I was an artist all right, but not a good enough one to count; had I been a shopkeeper I might have sold my goods." "Well, then, here's your question, Miss Cardinal. Why on earth did I go on writing? ... Simply because I couldn't help myself. Writing was the only thing in the world that gave me happiness. I thought too that there might be people, here and there, unknown to me who cared for what I did. Not many of course--I soon discovered that outside the small library set in London no one had ever heard of me. When I was younger I had fancied that that to me fiery blazing advertisement: "New Novel by William Magnus, author of ..." must cause men to stop in the street, exclaim, rush home to tell their wives, 'Do you know Magnus' new novel is out?'--now I realised that by nine out of every ten men and five out of every ten women the literary page in the paper is turned over with exactly the same impatience with which I turn over the betting columns. Anyway, why not? ... perfectly right. And then by this time I'd seen my old books, often enough, lying scattered amongst dusty piles in second-hand shops marked, 'All this lot 6d.' Hundreds and hundreds of six-shilling novels, dirty, degraded, ashamed ... I'd ask, sometimes, when I was very young, for my own works. 'What's the name? What? Magnus?--No, don't stock him. No demand. We could get you a copy, sir...' There it is. Why not laugh at it? I was doing perhaps the most useless thing in the world. A commonplace little water-colour, hung on a wall, can give happiness to heaps of people; a poor piece of music can do a thousand things, good and bad, but an unsuccessful novel--twenty unsuccessful novels! A whole row, with the same history awaiting their successors ... 'We welcome a new novel by Mr. William Magnus, who our readers will remember wrote that clever story ... The