It is only as a result of the stoppage of his creative life that we can explain also the endless distractions to which his literary career was subject. "I came here," he writes from London as early as 1872, "to take notes for a book, but I haven't done much but attend dinners and make speeches." That innocent _réclame_ of his, that irresistible passion for the limelight which was forever drawing off the forces that ought to have been invested in his work, was due largely, no doubt, to his inordinate desire for approval, for self-corroboration. But if his heart had been in his work would he have courted so many interruptions? For court them he did: he invited, he brought upon himself a mode of living that made work almost impossible. "I don't really get anything done worth speaking of," he writes in 1881, "except during the three or four months that we are away in the summer.... I keep three or four books on the stocks all the time, but I seldom add a satisfactory chapter to one of them." Was Mrs. Clemens to blame? We are distinctly told that she was dazed, that she was appalled, at the extravagant manner of living into which the household had drifted. Mark Twain's vast energy had flowed into this channel of the opulent householder because it had not been able to find free expression in his work, and the happier he was in that rôle the more irksome his work became. "Maybe you think I am not happy?" he writes. "The very thing that gravels me is that I am. I don't want to be happy when I can't work. I am resolved that hereafter I won't be." And at that brilliant apogee of his life, when his daughter noted that he had just become interested in "mind-cure," he took up his writing quarters in the billiard-room where, perfect witness that he was to the truth of Herbert Spencer's old saw about billiard-playing and a misspent youth, he was ready at all hours to receive his friends and impress them into the game, where, indeed, he could almost count on the pleasure of being interrupted. He, whose literary work had become a mere appanage of his domestic life, whose writing went by fits and starts, and who certainly took no pains to keep himself in form for it, had such a passion for billiards that he would play all night and "stay till the last man gave out from sheer exhaustion."