Royalty and really great folk—that is great-minded people in high places—do not carp at the clothes of those whose work in life is harder than showing off new and expensive dresses. Thank goodness, the days are long dead when writers were supposed to exist on the sufferance of publishers, to be always ragged, in debt, or to fawn on patrons and live in Grub Street. Still, this is forestalling the account of my laborious, weary time before achieving anything, so it must be put down in faithful warning that “good times” have to be worked and waited for. I often wonder now how I lived through those first years of hardship, paying off debts, working often ten hours a day with the constant goal of making an income and achieving success. Poverty or ambition are the only stepping-stones to attainment. Perseverance did it, and bed. On and on I pegged. Wrote and re-wrote some things several times over, while others were not even corrected. Worked with throbbing eyes and weary brain—I’ve always been more or less a teetotaller, but it wasn’t that which helped me—it was bed. Never a good sleeper at any time, I crept off to bed as early as possible, and even if I did not sleep, I rested my back, closed my eyes, and lay in the dark. Most of my work was planned then, all my articles were thought out in that silent obscurity. My bed was my salvation. Lots of people work best in the evening and the small hours of the morning. I was never any good then, and if “copy” had to be ready, say, by eleven at night, and I knew a “printer’s devil” would be standing in my hall at that hour to bear it away to the machines, I always got hot and cold, nervous and fussy; I never worked so well as directly after breakfast. Work! Would anyone dare to say I have not worked? Why, in one fortnight (November, 1906) I see I had long signed articles in the _Queen_, _Daily Chronicle_, _Observer_, _Daily Mail_, and _Tatler_. Five important papers, besides unsigned articles in others. “What does a signed article imply?” someone may wonder. It means double, treble, quadruple pay—as compared with an unsigned one. It means the writer’s name is of value, and sufficiently established to say what he thinks and means right out, instead of sending his poisoned darts unofficially in the disguise of anonymity. All articles and reviews ought to be signed, I think. One takes more care, gives more thought, attains a higher standard than for anonymous stuff. Leaders and critiques would be of real value if one knew who had written them. Ease has come, facility of the pen. I believe I could write an article on almost any sort of subject with five minutes’ notice, and twenty minutes in which to dictate it. It is so easy to write on a theme which you never really touch on at all, but just glide along the outside edge. Things conceived like this cannot be of permanent value, but they are the product of an active brain and serve their purpose for the moment. That is journalism.