No! Free-lancing was not precisely a triumph for me. Call it my purgatorio. I shone sometimes with a feeble flicker, in half-crown paragraphs, and in jumpy articles under alliterative titles that now and then flared on a pink or yellow contents-bill. But I can state with some certainty that my earnings in the mass did not exceed threepence an hour. During all this time I was continually spurred by the artists around me, who naïvely believed in me, and who were cognizant only of my successes. I never spoke of defeat; I used to retire to my room with rejected stuff as impassive as a wounded Indian; while opening envelopes at breakfast I had the most perfect command of my features. Mere vanity always did and always will prevent me from acknowledging a reverse at the moment; not till I have retrieved my position can I refer to a discomfiture. Consequently, my small world regarded me as much more successful than I really was. Had I to live again, which Apollo forbid, I would pursue the same policy. During all this time, too, I was absorbing French fiction incessantly; in French fiction I include the work of Turgenev, because I read him always in French translations. Turgenev, the brothers de Goncourt, and de Maupassant were my gods. I accepted their canons, and they filled me with a general scorn of English fiction which I have never quite lost. From the composition of 'bits' articles I turned to admire "Fathers and Children" or "Une Vie," and the violence of the contrast never struck me at the time. I did not regard myself as an artist, or as emotional by temperament. My ambition was to be a journalist merely--cool, smart, ingenious, equal to every emergency. I prided myself on my impassivity. I was acquainted with men who wept at fine music--I felt sure that Saint Cecilia and the heavenly choir could not draw a single tear from my journalistic eye. I failed to perceive that my appreciation of French fiction, and the harangues on fiction which I delivered to my intimates, were essentially emotional in character, and I forgot that the sight of a successful dramatist before the curtain on a first-night always caused me to shake with a mysterious and profound agitation. I mention these facts to show how I misunderstood, or ignored, the progress of my spiritual development. A crisis was at hand. I suffered from insomnia and other intellectual complaints, and went to consult a physician who was also a friend. "You know," he said, in the course of talk, "you are one of the most highly-strung men I have ever met."