He spoke in a slow, meditative way, in a monotonous voice, and
without raising his eyes from the ground.

'I can understand,' put in Jasper, 'that there may be
philosophical truth in all this. All the same, it's a great pity
that you should occupy your mind with such thoughts.'

'A pity--no! I must remain a reasoning creature. Disaster may end
by driving me out of my wits, but till then I won't abandon my
heritage of thought.'

'Let us have it out, then. You think it was a mistake to spend
those months abroad?'

'A mistake from the practical point of view. That vast broadening
of my horizon lost me the command of my literary resources. I
lived in Italy and Greece as a student, concerned especially with
the old civilisations; I read little but Greek and Latin. That
brought me out of the track I had laboriously made for myself I
often thought with disgust of the kind of work I had been doing;
my novels seemed vapid stuff so wretchedly and shallowly modern.
If I had had the means, I should have devoted myself to the life
of a scholar. That, I quite believe, is my natural life; it's
only the influence of recent circumstances that has made me a
writer of novels. A man who can't journalise, yet must earn his
bread by literature, nowadays inevitably turns to fiction, as the
Elizabethan men turned to the drama. Well, but I should have got
back, I think, into the old line of work. It was my marriage that
completed what the time abroad had begun.'