I must be left alone to do it. I _don't_ 'come home,' as you so
poetically put it; I'm there all the time. So would your 'kiddies' be,
and they'd be a damned bore. Just when I was dying to get on with my
new book, they'd be what you call 'keen to see me' and squall if I
wouldn't. Oh, I can see it all. I've too much imagination, far, to
need to marry; I've been through it all a thousand times, without. I
can see my dear wife, as you call her, filthily jealous of my work and
grudging every minute that I took for it. It's all so different for
you fellows who go off to work. You've got your hours of solitude all
free for business and then you come back to tea, if you're a slacker,
as you've just described. But nobody ever believes that novelists do
any work; it's just their hobby in spare moments! Any one may
interrupt and there is no harm done. My dear wife would buzz in and
out and ask me what I liked for lunch.... Oh, yes, I can see it all."

"You've no idea of it at all," said Kenneth Boyd almost passionately in
his deep, sincere-sounding voice.

"And as to loneliness," Hubert went on, utterly ignoring him, "I see
too many people as it is. I'm always booked. I absolutely curse them
sometimes when I feel I haven't seen them for a century and they'll be
getting huffy. Constant companion and all that stuff, indeed? No,
thanks! Shall I tell you _my_ idea of bliss?"

"This, I suppose?" the other asked, waving his pipe-stem pitilessly
around the untidy room, where school football-groups mingled with
Burne-Jones survivals from the Oxford age; where books usurped chairs,
sofa, floor, piano-top; where no intrusive female hand was suffered,
clearly, with methodic duster.

"No," answered Hubert, "though I'm fond of it. It's good enough for me
as home. No, my idea of bliss is just an afternoon when I've no teas,
appointments, duties, anything; when I am really free. Then I put on
my very oldest suit and get out right along the river, Richmond
way--Kew, Putney, anywhere--and stretch my lungs and look at the old
book-shops and enjoy the river. That's when _I_'m happy, you see! I
look at the river, out by Richmond Bridge, broad and festive and the
sun upon it; everything all full of life; and I feel free, and that's
the time I take a deep breath in--or by the sea, of course--and say,
'Thank God that I'm alive!'"

"And thank God you're alone?" his friend enquired. He looked across at
him, no longer by now a