The room was not so much scantily as arbitrarily furnished. It contained a big mahogany sideboard; a common deal table, an extraordinary kind of folding wash-hand-stand; a deal bookshelf, the cane lounge, and three unrelated chairs. There were three framed Dutch prints on the marble mantel-shelf; striped curtains before the windows. A square, cheap looking-glass, with a razor above it, hung between them. And on the floor, on the chairs, on the sideboard, on the unmade bed, the profusion of manuscripts. He scribbled something on a blue paper and began to roll a cigarette. He took off his glasses, rubbed them, and closed his eyes tightly. "Well, and how's Sussex?" he asked. I felt a sudden attack of what, essentially, was nostalgia. The fact that I was really leaving an old course of life, was actually and finally breaking with it, became vividly apparent. Lea, you see, stood for what was best in the mode of thought that I was casting aside. He stood for the aspiration. The brooding, the moodiness; all the childish qualities, were my own importations. I was a little ashamed to tell him, that--that I was going to live, in fact. Some of the glory of it had gone, as if one of two candles I had been reading by had flickered out. But I told him, after a fashion, that I had got a job at last. "Oh, I congratulate you," he said. "You see," I began to combat the objections he had not had time to utter, "even for my work it will be a good thing--I wasn't seeing enough of life to be able to...." "Oh, of course not," he answered--"it'll be a good thing. You must have been having a pretty bad time." It struck me as abominably unfair. I hadn't taken up with the _Hour_ because I was tired of having a bad time, but for other reasons: because I had felt my soul being crushed within me. "You're mistaken," I said. And I explained. He answered, "Yes, yes," but I fancied that he was adding to himself--"They all say that." I grew more angry. Lea's opinion formed, to some extent, the background of my life. For many years I had been writing quite as much to satisfy him as to satisfy myself, and his coldness chilled me. He thought that my heart was not in my work, and I did not want Lea to think that of me. I tried to explain as much to him--but it was difficult, and he gave me no help. I knew there had been others that he had fostered, only to see them, in the end, drift into the back-wash. And now he thought I was going too.... "Here," he said, suddenly breaking away from the subject, "look at that."