other should be finished before I took any rest, and so I wound up the
Sleeper sufficiently to make it a marketable work, hoping to be able to
revise it before the book printers at any rate got hold of it. But
fortune was against me. I came back to England from Italy only to fall
dangerously ill, and I still remember the impotent rage and strain of my
attempt to put some sort of finish to my story of Mr. Lewisham, with my
temperature at a hundred and two. I couldn't endure the thought of
leaving that book a fragment. I did afterwards contrive to save it from
the consequences of that febrile spurt--_Love and Mr. Lewisham_ is indeed
one of my most carefully balanced books--but the Sleeper escaped me.

It is twelve years now since the Sleeper was written, and that young man
of thirty-one is already too remote for me to attempt any very drastic
reconstruction of his work. I have played now merely the part of an
editorial elder brother: cut out relentlessly a number of long tiresome
passages that showed all too plainly the fagged, toiling brain, the heavy
sluggish _driven_ pen, and straightened out certain indecisions at the
end. Except for that, I have done no more than hack here and there at
clumsy phrases and repetitions. The worst thing in the earlier version,
and the thing that rankled most in my mind, was the treatment of the
relations of Helen Wotton and Graham. Haste in art is almost always
vulgarisation, and I slipped into the obvious vulgarity of making what
the newspaper syndicates call a "love interest" out of Helen. There was
even a clumsy intimation that instead of going up in the flying-machine
to fight, Graham might have given in to Ostrog, and married Helen. I have
now removed the suggestion of these uncanny connubialities. Not the
slightest intimation of any sexual interest could in truth have arisen
between these two. They loved and kissed one another, but as a girl and
her heroic grandfather might love, and in a crisis kiss. I have found it
possible, without any very serious disarrangement, to clear all that