“There has been no biography of me. How would you like it if it had been you? And all the critics said I would live....” “Must I stay for that?” “You promised, you know.” “Did I? I had forgotten.” “No, no. You could not forget, not even you. And you will make your readers cry.” “But if I make myself cry too?” “Write.” And I wrote, sick with exhaustion, without conscious volition or the power to stop. I wonder whether any other writer has ever had this experience. I could not stop writing although my arm swelled to an unnatural size and my side ached. I covered ream after ream of paper. I never stopped nor halted for word or thought. I was wearied, aching from head to foot, shaking and even crying with fatigue and the pain in my swollen arm or side, but never ceasing to write, like a galley slave at his oar. Sometimes in swimming semi-consciousness I thought this was my eternal punishment, that because I had swept so much aside that I might write, and yet had written badly, now I must write for ever and for ever, words and scenes and sentences that would be obliterated, that would not stand. I knew in these semi-conscious moments that I was writing in water and not in ink. But I was driven on, and on, relentlessly. CHAPTER VIII Here is the story I wrote under morphia and in that strange driving stress, set down as well as I can recall it, but seeming now so much less real and distinct. I have not tried to polish, only to remember. There was then no effort after composition, no correction, transposition nor alteration, and neither is there now; nor conscious psychology nor sentiment. The scenes were all set in the house where I lay, and there was no pause in the continuity of the drama. I saw every gesture and heard every word spoken. The letters were and are before me as confirmatory evidence. My own intrusive illness minimised the interest of the circumstances to my immediate surroundings. But to me it seems that the consecutive actuality of the morphia dream or dreams is unusual if not unique, and gives value to the narrative. I refer to the MS. notes and diary for the beginning of the story, but have had to make several emendations and additions. There were too many epigrams, and the impression the writer wished to convey was only in the intention, and not in the execution. What she left out I have put in. It should be easy to separate my work from hers. And she carried her story very little way. From the beginning of the letters the autobiography stopped. It started abruptly, and ended in the same way. There were trial titles in the MS. notes. “Between the Nisi and the Absolute” competed in favour with “The Love Story of a Woman of Genius.”