shoulder. "Courage," she says, stroking his hyacinthine locks (whereas
all real literary men are more or less grey or bald). Sometimes, as in
_Our Flat_, comic tradesmen interrupt the course of true literature with
their ignoble desire for cash payment, and sometimes, as in _Our Boys_,
uncles come and weep at the infinite pathos of a bad breakfast egg. But
it's always a very sordid, dusty, lump-in-your-throaty affair, and no
doubt it conduces to mortality by deterring the young and impressionable
from literary vices. As for its truth, that is another matter
altogether.

Yet it must not be really imagined that a literary household is just
like any other. There is the brass paper-fastener, for instance. I have
sometimes thought that Euphemia married me with an eye to these
conveniences. She has two in her grey gloves, and one (with the head
inked) in her boot in the place of a button. Others I suspect her of.
Then she fastened the lamp shade together with them, and tried one day
to introduce them instead of pearl buttons as efficient anchorage for
cuffs and collars. And she made a new handle for the little drawer under
the inkstand with one. Indeed, the literary household is held together,
so to speak, by paper-fasteners, and how other people get along without
them we are at a loss to imagine.

And another point, almost equally important, is that the husband is
generally messing about at home. That is, indeed, to a superficial
observer, one of the most remarkable characteristics of the literary
household. Other husbands are cast out in the morning to raven for
income and return to a home that is swept and garnished towards the end
of the day; but the literary husband is ever in possession. His work
must not be disturbed even when he is merely thinking. The study is
consequently a kind of domestic cordite factory, and you are never