So I had been through the mill! Writing articles at night and getting them back the next morning but one, for a year or two--that was going through the mill! Let it be so, then. When other men envied my position, and expressed their opinion that I had "got on to a soft thing," I indicated that the present was the fruit of the past, and that I had been through the mill. Journalism for women, by women under the direction of men, is an affair at once anxious, agreeable and delicate for the men who direct. It is a journalism by itself, apart from other journalisms. And it is the only journalism that I intimately know. The commercial side of it, the queer financial basis of it, have a peculiar interest, but my scheme does not by any means include the withdrawal of those curtains. I am concerned with letters, and letters, I fear, have little connection with women's journalism. I learnt nothing of letters in that office, save a few of the more obvious journalistic devices, but I learnt a good deal about frocks, household management, and the secret nature of women, especially the secret nature of women. As for frocks, I have sincerely tried to forget that branch of human knowledge; nevertheless the habit, acquired then, of glancing first at a woman's skirt and her shoes, has never left me. My apprenticeship to frocks was studded with embarrassing situations, of which I will mention only one. It turns upon some designs for a layette. A layette, perhaps I ought to explain, is an outfit for a new-born babe, and naturally it is prepared in advance of the stranger's arrival. Underneath a page of layette illustrations I once put the legend, correct in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand--but this was the thousandth--_Cut-to-measure patterns supplied_. The solecism stands to all eternity against me on the file of the paper; and the recollection of it, like the recollection of a _gaucherie_, is persistently haunting. And here I shall quit for a time the feminine atmosphere, and the path which I began by calling dusty, but which is better called flowery. My activity in that path showed no further development until after I had written my first novel. VII "By heaven!" I said, "I will write a novel!"