And how dreadful it is to want to read suddenly "Love in the Valley," and have to be content with Tennyson, to long for a chapter of Dostoieffsky, and be met with complete editions of Trollope and Surtees! So I see that my middle age will be crabbed and made solitary by my books, and that I shall never have the heart to leave them and go to the East to see the land of my father Haik, or to walk about the lake upon which the great Queen Semiramis (who was the first in the world to discover that men could be conveniently changed into eunuchs) built the city Semiramakert, which is now called Van, and where later, when she was pursued by the swordsmen of her son, she threw a magic bracelet into the lake and turned herself into a rock, which still stands there covered with the triumphant script of the Assyrians. _The London Venture_: II [Illustration] II Once (in those far-off peaceful days when men still had enough grammatical sense to know that the word "pacifist" does not exist, but that the less convenient "pacificist" does) I had been very depressed for a week, and had scarcely spoken to any one, but had just walked about in my rooms and on the Embankment, for I suddenly found myself without any money at all; and it is thus with me that when I am without money I am also without ideas, but when I have the first I do not necessarily have the last. I wondered if I had not done a very silly thing in being independent, and in not doing as my brothers had done, reading "The Times" in an office every morning from ten to twelve, and playing dominoes in the afternoon, and auction bridge in the evening, and having several thousands a year when I was forty, and a Wolseley car to take my wife for a holiday to Windermere, because she looked pale, or because we were bored with each other. I smiled to think of the look on my brothers' faces if I suddenly appeared at their office one morning, and said that it was no good, and that I couldn't write, and was very hungry. I could not make up my mind whether they would laugh at me and turn me out, or whether they would teach me how to play auction and set me to answer letters about what had happened on such and such a day inst., and why the firm of ---- thought it unnecessary that it should happen again, while they would sit in the next room, marked "Private," signing cheques and talking to visitors about the weather and the cotton markets. Perhaps I will do that some day, for, from what I have heard, it seems to me the easiest thing in the world to talk about rises and falls and margins without knowing anything about them at all.