before I slept. This was committing myself definitely, I won't say to
another life, but to another book. There is apparently something in my
character which will not allow me to abandon for good any piece of work
I have begun. I have laid aside many beginnings. I have laid them aside
with sorrow, with disgust, with rage, with melancholy and even with
self-contempt; but even at the worst I had an uneasy consciousness that
I would have to go back to them.

"An Outcast of the Islands" belongs to those novels of mine that were
never laid aside; and though it brought me the qualification of "exotic
writer" I don't think the charge was at all justified.

For the life of me I don't see that there is the slightest exotic spirit
in the conception or style of that novel. It is certainly the most
_tropical_ of my eastern tales. The mere scenery got a great hold on
me as I went on, perhaps because (I may just as well confess that) the
story itself was never very near my heart.

It engaged my imagination much more than my affection. As to my feeling
for Willems it was but the regard one cannot help having for one's own
creation. Obviously I could not be indifferent to a man on whose head I
had brought so much evil simply by imagining him such as he appears in
the novel--and that, too, on a very slight foundation.

The man who suggested Willems to me was not particularly interesting in
himself. My interest was aroused by his dependent position, his strange,
dubious status of a mistrusted, disliked, worn-out European living on
the reluctant toleration of that Settlement hidden in the heart of the
forest-land, up that sombre stream which our ship was the only white
men's ship to visit. With his hollow, clean-shaved cheeks, a heavy grey