of "The Island Pharisees"--but it would be about August, 1901. Like all
the stories in "Villa Rubein," and, indeed, most of my tales, the book
originated in the curiosity, philosophic reflections, and unphilosophic
emotions roused in me by some single figure in real life. In this case
it was Ferrand, whose real name, of course, was not Ferrand, and who
died in some "sacred institution" many years ago of a consumption
brought on by the conditions of his wandering life. If not "a beloved,"
he was a true vagabond, and I first met him in the Champs Elysees, just
as in "The Pigeon" he describes his meeting with Wellwyn. Though drawn
very much from life, he did not in the end turn out very like the
Ferrand of real life--the figures of fiction soon diverge from their
prototypes.

The first draft of "The Island Pharisees" was buried in a drawer; when
retrieved the other day, after nineteen years, it disclosed a picaresque
string of anecdotes told by Ferrand in the first person. These
two-thirds of a book were laid to rest by Edward Garnett's dictum that
its author was not sufficiently within Ferrand's skin; and, struggling
heavily with laziness and pride, he started afresh in the skin of
Shelton. Three times be wrote that novel, and then it was long in
finding the eye of Sydney Pawling, who accepted it for Heinemann's in
1904. That was a period of ferment and transition with me, a kind of
long awakening to the home truths of social existence and national
character. The liquor bubbled too furiously for clear bottling. And
the book, after all, became but an introduction to all those following
novels which depict--somewhat satirically--the various sections of
English "Society" with a more or less capital "S."

Looking back on the long-stretched-out body of one's work, it is
interesting to mark the endless duel fought within a man between the