I felt I might know at any moment, and had but to give my mind to it.
Maupassant was an impeccable artist, but I think the secret of the
hold he had on the young men of my day was not so much that we
discerned his cunning as that we delighted in the simplicity which his
cunning achieved. I had read a great number of his short stories, but
none that had made me feel as though I, if I were a writer, mightn't
have written it myself. Maupassant had an European reputation. It was
pleasing, it was soothing and gratifying, to feel that one could at
any time win an equal fame if one chose to set pen to paper. And now,
suddenly, the spring had been touched in me, the time was come. I was
grateful for the fluke by which I had witnessed on the terrace that
evocative scene. I looked forward to reading the MS. of `The Fan'--to-
morrow, at latest. I was not wildly ambitious. I was not inordinately
vain. I knew I couldn't ever, with the best will in the world, write
like Mr. George Meredith. Those wondrous works of his, seething with
wit, with poetry and philosophy and what not, never had beguiled me
with the sense that I might do something similar. I had full
consciousness of not being a philosopher, of not being a poet, and of
not being a wit. Well, Maupassant was none of these things. He was
just an observer, like me. Of course he was a good deal older than I,
and had observed a good deal more. But it seemed to me that he was not
my superior in knowledge of life. I knew all about life through him.

Dimly, the initial paragraph of my tale floated in my mind. I--not
exactly I myself, but rather that impersonal je familiar to me through
Maupassant--was to be sitting at that table, with a bock before me,
just as I had sat. Four or five short sentences would give the whole
scene. One of these I had quite definitely composed. You have already
heard it. `Down below, the sea rustled to and fro over the shingle.'